Altice USA, which recently became the country's fourth largest cable company by purchasing Cablevision and Suddenlink, today announced a big project to replace cable with fiber-to-the-home technology. Altice said it intends to "deliver broadband speeds of up to 10 Gbps across its footprint."

Based in the Netherlands, Altice purchased Suddenlink in December 2015 and Cablevision in June this year. The Altice USA division has 4.1 million broadband subscribers and 3.6 million pay-TV subscribers. Counting customers who subscribe to one or more services, Altice USA has 4.6 million customers in 20 states.

Cable dominates the US broadband market, easily outperforming DSL networks that use old copper telephone lines. But fiber is generally even faster than cable, especially in upload speeds, so cable companies including Comcast have been building fiber-to-the-home in some areas.

Altice said it has a five-year deployment schedule that, beginning in 2017, will bring fiber to its entire Cablevision Optimum footprint and most of its Suddenlink territory. Though fiber construction is expensive, Altice said its new network architecture will reduce energy costs and thus cover much of the expense. "Altice expects to reinvest efficiency savings to support the buildout without a material change in its overall capital budget," the company said.

Before the purchase by Altice, Cablevision had 3.1 million subscribers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. That amount included any customer who subscribed to one or more of the company's Internet, phone, and TV services. (Verizon FiOS is also available in the three Cablevision states.) Suddenlink had 1.5 million subscribers in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Altice could increase speeds over existing cable lines simply by upgrading back-office and customer premises equipment with DOCSIS 3.1 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) gear. But CEO Dexter Goei says that fiber will remain superior despite improvements in cable. “We know that there will be applications and demand for further bandwidth going forward, whether that is in two, three, four, or five years,” Goei said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Altice hasn't yet announced which states will get the first fiber rollouts, but the company expects to make those announcements "in the coming months."