Greetings, and welcome to the Altice USA Q1 2022 earnings results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A Q&A session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Nick Brown. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining. In a moment, I'll hand over to Altice USA CEO, Dexter Goei, and CFO, Mike Grau, who will take you through the presentation, and then we'll open the lines for Q&A. As today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, please read the disclaimer on slide two. Dexter, please go ahead.
Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everyone. Jumping in with the summary of our recent quarterly performance on slide four. Revenue in Q1 declined 2.3% year-over-year, driven by our residential business, partly offset by strength in news and advertising. Broadband customer net losses were 13,000 for Q1, with trends similar to those at the end of last year, as we have not yet realized the full benefits of our growth initiatives. Q1 adjusted EBITDA declined 7.7% with a margin of 40.9%, reflecting both the revenue decline and higher OpEx to drive future growth. Free cash flow of $208 million was solid, even with the elevated levels of investment as we're accelerating our fiber expansion, new build activity, and other network upgrades.
Recall we launched more competitive internet plus mobile converged offerings in January, and in March, we announced an expanded MVNO agreement with T-Mobile, allowing us to offer more attractive mobile promotions. We believe we are in a significantly better competitive position today than we were 12 months ago, and we're moving full steam ahead preparing for the launch of our own multi-gig fiber broadband service later this year on our Optimum fiber network. Additionally, we continue to expand our sales distribution channels to support growth and have commenced the rebrand of Suddenlink into Optimum to drive home a more uniform and fresh marketing effort and customer experience. Slide 5 shows our revenue trends in more detail. Total reported revenue in Q1 declined 2.3% year-over-year, mainly due to the recent expected pressure on our residential business, which declined 3.6%.
I'll discuss our residential trends in more detail in a moment. Total revenue was down 2.1%, excluding about $5 million of prior year AirStrand revenue. To remind you, our backhaul contract with T-Mobile was terminated at the end of last year. This will result in the loss of about $125 million of AirStrand revenue this year when comparing to 2021, with about $110 million of this in the H2 of the year coming out of our business services division. You can see business services revenue in Q1 was flat year-over-year on a reported basis, but grew 1.5% excluding this AirStrand revenue. News and advertising grew 9.1% in Q1, which is now approaching pre-pandemic levels of growth. Moving to slide six and Q1 customer trends in our residential business.
We report a net loss of 21,000 residential customer relationships in Q1 and a broadband net loss of 13,000. Remember, in 2020, we had a big boost in the early days of the pandemic, and customer trends have not yet fully normalized, and we saw much of the additional growth reversing in the last few quarters. We are still seeing a lower level of gross additions across the company, however, churn in our footprint has now clearly stabilized. We did not need to push as hard on marketing promotions as we did in the Q4 since we aligned our offers more closely with Fios, and you can see this reflected in our ARPU trends stabilizing sequentially.
The main drag on our year-over-year residential revenue and ARPU remains the loss of video customers, which has increased in recent quarters as the gross ad video attachment rate continues to fall, and we have been passing through more of the programming cost inflation. Normally, we would offset this with broadband and unique customer growth, but given temporary declines here, we're seeing the full impact of the video loss. Given the progress we're making on our growth initiatives, we are confident that we will return to broadband customer growth in the H2 of this year with our accelerated fiber rollout, multi-gig services, and new build activity, complemented by more attractive mobile bundles and expanded sales distribution channels. Turning to slide seven on business services.
Revenue growth of 1.5%, excluding AirStrand revenue, is slightly below the last couple of quarters as the comps are normalizing after comparing to 2020 when we saw a reduction in sales volume with less small business activity. Given more positive customer trends now, we expect to see revenue growth accelerate again as we go through this year. SMB and other revenue grew 1.9% ex AirStrand, and Lightpath revenue grew 0.6%. Net sales bookings at Lightpath increased 70% year-over-year in Q1, which is a huge jump due to benefiting from our recent network expansions, new market launches, and expanded sales force. We anticipate that this should also contribute to accelerated revenue growth in the coming quarters. Slide eight shows an update on our news and advertising business.
Revenue grew 9.1% in Q1 with year-over-year comparisons normalizing here now as well. Excluding autos, which remain weak, revenue grew about 15%. In particular, we're seeing strength with the travel and entertainment sectors coming back, plus a boost from sports betting as this has now been legalized in certain states, including New York. Additionally, we expect more of a political benefit this year in the H2 given the midterm elections. Slide 10 is a recap of the strategic measures we announced at the end of last year to enhance the company's network, product portfolios, and customer experience on an accelerated basis.
I'll go through each one of these initiatives in more detail now. Turning to slide 11, we are on track to bring 100% fiber broadband, delivering multi-gig speeds to more than two-thirds of our entire footprint over the next four years, reaching a total of 6.5 million FTTH passings by the end of 2025. This will include at least 4 million fiber passings at Optimum, which will be done by 2024, and at least 2.5 million fiber passings at Suddenlink. We are confident that this is the right approach to improve the customer experience and has enhanced the value of the business.
Total incremental fiber passings and related CapEx should peak in 2023 and 2024 at around 1.6 million new passings in both years, especially as we expand across the Suddenlink footprint at an accelerated pace. We expect with a more differentiated broadband service to drive higher gross additions and reduce churn, given the reliability of the fiber network service, reducing our long-term network maintenance, technical and customer care costs. When comparing the experience of broadband customers on our fiber network to that of customers on our HFC network, we are now seeing 66% NPS improvement, 7% higher ARPU on gross adds, and around 5%-6% annualized churn benefits, and significant reduction in incidence rates. From a trends perspective, we're seeing these customer metrics improve every month.
Slide 12 gives a current snapshot of progress with our fiber build and customer trends. You can see on the left, we released an incremental 146,000 fiber passings during Q1, reaching just over 1.3 million total passings, mainly in our Optimum footprint. We expect incremental growth on fiber passings to meaningfully step up in Q2 and Q3 following our increased investment, and given the spring and summer months are more conducive to construction and deployment with the better weather. On the right, you can see our quarterly fiber net adds have been about 11,000-12,000 per quarter, and we have now reached just over 6% fiber customer penetration with 81,000 fiber customers. To be clear, our customer penetration market share in these areas, including customers on our HFC network, is much higher, typically above 50%.
On the fiber side, we are mostly focused on adding new customers onto our fiber network. We are now starting to ramp up on existing customer migrations, which when combined with the rapidly expanding FTTH footprint, will lead to an improved churn and faster customer growth. Slide 13 demonstrates the runway we have to sell broadband services that can support very high levels of data usage. The average download speeds customers take now has increased to 363 Mbps, which continues to grow as customers are increasingly taking our 1 Gb service. Our 1 Gb customer penetration increased to 17% in Q1, which is up over 70% from a year ago, with just under 50% of all new customers now taking 1 Gb speeds.
Around 46% of our customer base takes speeds of 200 Mbps or lower, so we still have a huge opportunity to keep driving customers to higher speeds. Average monthly data usage for broadband-only customers was 630 GB in Q1, with video streaming still the biggest driver. Looking at our highest data consuming customers, 15% of our broadband-only customers are using more than 1 TB of data per month. Given these trends and insights, we are confident we're making the right decisions in focusing on fiber to future-proof our network. Fiber is the best technology that exists today to support high levels of throughput and data usage with very low latency and very high reliability of service.
Fiber is also a proven technology which is widely available at a reasonable cost today, so there's also a time to market advantage versus upgrading DOCSIS or other HFC network upgrades. The fiber network we're building is also very easily scalable and will allow much faster upgrades in the future to enable more capacity and higher broadband speeds. It's the difference of having about 500,000 active components in our HFC network today that would need upgrading versus just a few thousand pieces of equipment in our new fiber network for the same number of homes. This is why we'll be able to launch multi-gig symmetrical speeds on our fiber network later this year, just by adding modules at our head end and in our field cabinets without needing to change any of the physical infrastructure.
On slide 14, you can see we added 42,000 new building passings in Q1 and are on track to adding approximately 175,000 this year. We're mostly edging out around the Suddenlink footprint, and about one-third of our new total home new build activity this year will be in fiber homes. We are still achieving about 40% penetration after the first year of expanding our network into new areas, so there's a very clear correlation with new customer growth. Separately, we're also on track this year to complete the upgrade of about 100,000 Suddenlink HFC homes in areas where customers previously only received maximum download speeds of 150 Mbps, increasing this to either 400 Mbps or 1 Gb . We upgraded 16,000 of these homes in Q1.
Lastly, as an update on our broadband subsidy applications, we received our first award for 8,000 homes in the Yavapai County, Arizona, and the team is actively working to significantly increase our total numbers of applications and awards. Slide 15 gives us an update on our mobile business, where we have reached now 198,000 customers as of the end of Q1, reaching 4.3% penetration of our residential customer base. In January, we launched our new converged offerings with up to $30 of monthly savings if you take both the broadband and mobile service from us.
In March, we extended our strategic MVNO agreement with T-Mobile on mutually beneficial terms. This new agreement gives us, among other things, much more flexibility on pricing, which is why we recently launched an aggressive 1 gigabyte promotion that drove about 2/3 of our additional customer growth for the quarter. We believe that as we continue to adjust our mobile and converged offerings, we can maintain a high level of mobile customer growth going forward and expect this will help improve broadband customer churn as well. Turning to slide 16 now is an illustration of our new Let's Reconnect campaign, which kicked off the rebrand of Suddenlink to Optimum. This campaign represents our company-wide commitment to reconnect with our customers, communities, and employees, unifying all of our products and services under the Optimum brand across our whole footprint.
The investments I've been describing today, including our network and product enhancements to improve our quality of service and customer experience, support this campaign. They set the stage for the roadmap ahead of us as we strengthen the relationship we have with our customers and solidify Optimum's position as their provider of choice. Now I'll hand it over to Mike to review some of the financials in more detail.
Thank you, Dexter, and good afternoon, everybody. Picking it up on slide 18 with a summary of our financials for the quarter. As Dexter outlined, our revenue declined 2.3% in Q1, with adjusted EBITDA declining 7.7%. You can see our adjusted EBITDA margin was 40.9% in Q1, which is just over 2 percentage points below the prior year quarter, reflecting higher operating costs to invest in some of the areas we've outlined to drive better customer growth and higher medium to long-term revenue and cash flow growth. For example, we are now well over 300 door-to-door salespeople and above 100 retail stores, and we've been putting money behind our new mobile converged offers.
There will be additional spend later this year as we continue to ramp up in these areas, including additional marketing to support our rebrand campaign, which is more of a one-off. Our cash CapEx was up 84% year-over-year, which I'll come back to in a moment. This all contributed to a 30% reduction in our EBITDA less CapEx or operating free cash flow. On slide 19, you can see our capital intensity was 16.2% in Q1, up from 8.6% in the prior-year quarter. Without fiber and new home build growth investment, capital intensity would have been 9.5%.
Our CapEx target in 2022 remains between $1.7 billion-$1.8 billion on a cash basis, including $300 million-$400 million of additional FTTH CapEx and $100 million-$200 million of additional new build CapEx compared to the prior year. Recall that after a couple of years of elevated CapEx to support our accelerated fiber rollout, we expect to start seeing significantly reduced CapEx after 2024, once we start scaling back the build. Slide 20 highlights the components of free cash flow in Q1, totaling $208 million for the quarter, which is lower year-over-year, given all of our accelerated growth investments. Our quarterly cash interest payments of about $300 million should be fairly even throughout the year.
Cash taxes were $23 million in the Q1 , but this should step up throughout the year. Lastly, other financing activities includes about $180 million of debt paydown using excess free cash flow. Finally, on slide 21, we show how we have a very well-termed-out debt maturity profile following recent and prior refinancing activity. We have no annual bond maturities greater than $1 billion before 2025, all of which could be covered by either free cash flow generation or capacity from our revolver. At the end of Q1, we had liquidity of approximately $1.9 billion on top of maintaining a healthy level of free cash flow generation. The weighted average life of our debt is currently six years, and our weighted average cost of debt is 4.6%.
As always, we will continue to proactively and opportunistically manage our liabilities. With that, we will now take any questions.
Operator, please open the lines for questions.
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press the star key followed by the number two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from John Hodulik with UBS. Please state your question.
Great. Dexter, just you know, I think it's the topic du jour. Anything you're seeing from a competitive standpoint in high-speed data? On the new converged fixed mobile offerings, just any commentary on sort of how they've been received and with just 4% penetration in wireless at this point, you know, you said you can continue to grow adds, but you know, what do you need to do to sort of accelerate the growth there on the wireless side? Thanks.
Thanks, John. On the competition side, listen, I think, you know, competition in the East in our Optimum footprint remains stable. We continue, I think, quarter-over-quarter, improving our competitive stance relative to Fios. We're really looking forward to being able to launch our new multi- Gb product in a few months from now, and they'll continue to roll that out throughout the year. That's pretty stable.
We are obviously starting to see Frontier come into the Connecticut footprint and have some stickiness in their efforts as they drive some of their fiber build there in small amounts. Mainly we are seeing incremental competition in the Suddenlink footprint, which is no surprise as AT&T continues to increase its fiber footprint, and we do have some smaller operators out there that are overbuilding. Primarily the results of the quarter are, you know, improved to stable churn, lower gross add activity, right? We're seeing lower gross add activity, I think really driven by lower move activity, but also some more competitive activity out in the West.
Related to your fixed mobile commentary, listen, we are very focused on growing that base. We'll continue to be thoughtful about how we bundle it with our fixed line product. We had a nice promotion that'll end here in the middle of May on one gig that was very successful, and we're seeing, you know, a good transformation, we believe, in terms of being able to upsell those from 1 Gb product to something more. We'll be thoughtful about our packaging and offers going forward, but we're very focused on it, and it'll be part, obviously, about our whole rebranding, reconnecting campaign. Throughout the year, we'll come up with various types of marketing efforts around the mobile product.
Okay. Thanks, Dexter.
Our next question comes from Phil Cusick with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks. I guess following up first on the wireless. The 3 Gb wireless customers, what does it cost you to add those? Are they bringing their own handset? Is there a substantial SAC there, or is it sort of a almost a free trial on your part?
I mean, it's pretty much a free trial. We see about 35% of our new mobile subscribers buying new handsets, and about 2/3 of them are bringing their own device. You know, they're signing up 3 Gb . I think today we're charging $25 for 3 Gb if it's not connected to your mobile, and then not connected to your fixed line subscription, and then you get a discount on your mobile and your fixed, depending on what type of speed you're taking on your fixed line side. From a SAC standpoint, you know, we don't look at it as an individual one product SAC.
We look pretty much at our overall marketing spend throughout our mobile product, which is really an allocation relative to our overall marketing spend, more of an accounting allocation. I think that if we were to try and figure out what we would attribute the losses in mobile to in the Q1 , that's probably somewhere around the $17-$18 million. It's very, very difficult to attribute unique marketing spend to mobile because of the converged offerings and the way we market out there, which is really about the Optimum brand and fiber and fixed line products as well.
To give you just some context in terms of the size of the loss in the Q1 from an accounting standpoint, it'd probably end up about being $17-$18 million. We don't really encourage disclosing that all the time because it's just a, it's more of a funny accounting number more than anything.
Okay. Thank you. I don't mean this to be flippant, but do you think you can grow broadband subscribers this year? Weak in the H1 , stronger in the back half. I know it's not perfect visibility, but any idea at this point?
Yeah, I mean, Phil, it's imperfect visibility. I mean, we definitely believe we're gonna be growing subscribers in the H2 of this year. You know, I can't tell you where the math will end up, whether it will be positive or not, but we're clearly pushing to be positive, and we've got some good momentum, we think, in terms of some of the initiatives that we've been working on for the last six months. I think that's probably as much foresight as I can give you at this point.
Thanks. Lastly, if I can, these federal awards, say the 8,000, what does that process look like? You know, is this sort of building momentum or are they still a little bit sparse right now?
It's not a federal process. These are local community processes. As you know, this is federal money being allocated to states and then states, in many respects, allocating them to communities. Not every case looks alike. Every single state and communities has got a different process. We are applying for every single community where we have a competitive advantage. They take a life of their own. There are twists and turns in every single one of these. Sometimes they start with RFPs saying 20,000 homes.
They can come back and say, "No, we actually wanna do 5,000 homes, and then we'll figure out the other 15,000 homes some other place." As you can think about it's really a lot of backdoor politics in terms of how to allocate money locally into something called infrastructure. I think that you know, having followed this very closely for the past six months, it's starting to get quite organized today. I think it was very disorganized in the back half of last year, and it's starting to get a lot more organized. We have a ton of applications that are pending, but the decision-making process takes a very long time.
Really just, every single process is very different. Typically, once you are awarded, the grant, the subsidy, they're looking for two-three years for you to deploy your network. Within that, you know, just in this Yavapai one, I believe we've got 24 months to deploy. Our expectation is to deploy hopefully in the next 12-18 months as quickly as possible and just move on to the next. We've got teams across our 21 states working actively on all of these subsidy programs.
Good. Thanks, Dexter.
Our next question comes from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson. Please state your question.
Hi. Thanks. Dexter, I'm gonna stay with broadband. The two questions, if I could. First, can you talk about the difference that you've seen in the legacy Optimum footprint versus the legacy Suddenlink footprint? It seems like, Verizon actually hit a relatively weak fiber result, and yet there's been very poor new household formation and sort of census demographics in legacy Optimum. I'm wondering what you're seeing in legacy Suddenlink, where it's presumably a more ripe target for fixed wireless access. Second, I wonder if you could just talk about the pricing strategy a little bit for broadband. Your ARPU is not growing very much, and yet you're adding a lot of 1 Gb subscribers.
Should we understand that to be that you're sort of readjusting some of the pricing or promotional pricing that some customers are on in some of the lower tiers?
Just on your first question, Craig, is the overall themes that talk about fixed wireless, and that competitive threat, or just kind of overall commentary on each one of them, each one of the footprints?
I guess overall commentary on each one of the footprints. Fixed wireless is obviously very topical in the Suddenlink footprint for a lot of investors.
Yeah. On the Optimum footprint, you know, I think I mentioned this in my commentary, my prepared comments on the presentation. You know, I think we've been performing a lot better relative to Fios. Obviously the bundling of our mobile product has been good. We have been promotional, very promotional, in the back half of last year, going into this year as well. All the customer service metrics are meaningfully higher, and we're being very thoughtful in pushing the fiber product. You know, we've got good momentum on the Optimum side, which probably reflects a little bit in the Fios numbers that they announce.
You know, the one part where we are seeing increased competition is in Frontier, in the Connecticut footprint, which is going to be 200,000 homes eventually when Frontier builds out there. We will be fully fiberized in Connecticut by the end of this year. I think we've got good momentum in terms of being able to address that competitive threat. On the Suddenlink footprint, I think obviously the primary competition is coming from AT&T as it upgrades fiber. It's gone from about 300,000 homes passed to about 600,000 homes passed in our footprint over the last 12 months. That incremental 300,000 homes passed is, you know, creating more competition for us.
We've got pockets of competitors, like Vexus, Tachus and some guys like that that are rolling out fiber, particularly in our Texas footprint there that's creating competition as well. You know, we're not seeing meaningful moves in terms of overbuild. We believe we're still at about the 25% overbuild level, but we clearly will see incremental competition going forward over the next several years as some builders continue to build out. You know, when we look at some of our penetration levels that fall off, you know, 500 subscribers here, 500 there, that is affecting our growth in the Suddenlink footprint.
We think we are very well positioned to address that over the next coming quarters and years with our fiber rollout, with what we're doing on our branding side and what we're doing with mobile. In terms of the fixed wireless side, we continue not to see a lot of competitive threats there. Definitely not in the Optimum footprint. If you look at even like what Starry is saying, that they cover about, you know, 15% of our footprint is covered by them. You know, we don't really see them active other than in certain MDU units.
On the Verizon side, I think just looking at their numbers, you know, a big chunk of their FWA numbers came from businesses, you know, construction sites and mobile businesses and as such. We're not really seeing a lot of pressure there. On the wireless, I think equally, we're not seeing pressure today in our selling footprint. It doesn't mean that we don't expect to see it going forward, but today we're not seeing any traction there on the FWA side. On pricing strategy, you know, I think I mentioned already in our year-end commentary that we were going to increase prices this year. We will be looking to increase prices, particularly at the higher levels there at the 1 Gb level.
Very pertinent to your question. You know, we've been very promotional as we're going through a transformation on the operating side over the last six months. We've stabilized really the churn numbers. The churn numbers keep on getting better, and it's really about driving gross adds going forward with product and service and less about price. We'll adjust those prices going forward, particularly as you mentioned. A lot of our gross adds are taking one gig, and we've been meaningfully cheaper than the competition on one gig over the last six months. We will be starting to move those.
You know, I had mentioned that if we had kept our promotions for the whole year, that we would be flat on broadband ARPU. We are, you know, up a buck and change on broadband ARPU sequentially Q4 to Q1. We expect to continue to grow that broadband ARPU throughout the year.
Helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brett Feldman with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I'm curious for a little more insight on who is taking the fiber to the home product. For example, to what extent, as you roll it out, are existing customers getting excited, calling in and asking for it? Or maybe to what extent are you finding that most of the customers who are taking it are moving into the residence? Or maybe it was a new build that had fiber from day one. I think on the last call, you talked about your strategy for actually doing the connect in a way that's friendly for the household.
I think you were gonna do two truck rolls, and you'd shared some insight on how long that was taking and the cost, and I'm wondering if any of that has changed or improved, since the last update. Thank you.
Brett Feldman, we've been not active on migrations. We launched migrations in March on a 1P basis, and we've launched migrations on a 3P basis here in April. We have not been actively pushing them. The customers that have been taking FTTH are really gross add customers. We don't offer HFC in the zones that we have fiber to the home unless there's a problem. 85% of our gross additions in the areas where we have fiber available are taking fiber. The remainder is there's a technical issue or there's a preference on the video side to have the old equipment, or certain exceptions like that.
Fundamentally, we will not be offering the HFC product in areas where we have fiber available. In terms of the migration strategy, we are literally right now starting to accelerate our migration strategy because all the statistics to your point about the install side have gotten significantly better in terms of install times. Yes, we are going 2 truck rolls on over 80% of the installs are 2 truck rolls. There are certain areas where we just say it's not efficient for us to do that, so they are longer truck roll times, which has allowed us to expand the windows of availability in terms of the install times.
You know, where an HFC install typically takes about 45-50 minutes, the FTTH install for the customer is around an hour and a half. We've meaningfully made that experience a lot more attractive for the customer, which is why we're starting to launch the migration side of the process a lot more aggressively. You know, the goal today is we're about averaging 5,000-6,000 net adds per month. We'd like to double that as quickly as possible, and being much more aggressive on the migration side. As we start releasing more and more homes over the rest of the year, you know, that's the target for us to get to those types of numbers.
I mean, the target for the year is to try and get to, you know, close to 200,000 fiber homes, fiber subscribers by the end of this year. Hopefully we'll be on track to deliver that with the efforts that we're doing.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question comes from James Ratcliffe with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Two, if I could. First of all, any commentary on any impact you're seeing from inflation and the cost structure in general, and, particularly around the cost of your fiber builds, both labor and equipment? And are you hitting any supply chain issues there? And secondly, did you have any significant impact from the migration from the Emergency Broadband Benefit to the ACP at the start of this year? And, you know, how big a business is that for you? Thanks.
On the first one, you know, clearly, you know, we've got about 1% of our overall cost base which relates to power, whether it be powering of the network, or part of our facilities side. That has remained pretty stable over the past couple of years. Clearly, you know, we may see pressure on the energy side, but it's only about $100 million of our entire cost base per year. Other things, you know, we've locked in on the supply chain, the fiber, and the CPE costs. And the labor side for this year and going into next year.
You know, we've got a pretty good predictability in terms of what we believe the cost per home is going to be on the fiber side and the new build side. You know, there are places, pockets of jurisdictions and communities who try to take advantage of things like cost of the police force that certain communities insist on escorting our trucks as we lay out fiber, which, you know, is not peanuts in terms of numbers, because they will affect, you know, maybe $10 million-$20 million of additional costs in terms of things that certain communities are trying to extract from us.
Overall, we've got the cost base pretty well contained here in terms of what we've planned and what we expect the costs to deliver over the next 12-18 months to be. On the second question, I'll let Mike answer that.
Yeah, James. On the actual migration from the former EBB program to the ACP program has not been problematic. It's been fairly seamless. It's not a material part of our business. I'd caution you when you see the numbers the government discloses about total enrollees, a substantial majority of those, at least 2/3, are using that subsidy for a mobile product rather than a broadband product. We have about 30,000 customers currently in the ACP program on our fixed side of the business.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Michael Rollins with Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks, and good afternoon. Earlier in the year, you outlined the size of some of the incremental investments in the operations to make the pivot, invest in marketing and service. I'm just curious how those items are trending for the year and how you see the impact for EBITDA over the course of 2022. Then as you're looking out at the business model, if you can, you know, give us an update on, you know, as you make this progression, you know, what the new state for Altice might look like in a few years, whether it's the prospects for revenue growth or how margins may look as you pivot to a more fiber-centric portfolio.
I think we're well on track relative to the targets on OpEx. You know, we're maintaining a lot of flexibility on the marketing dollars to increase that going forward. You know, we were kind of estimating $125 million+ of incremental OpEx going into this year, some of it being one-time relative to the rebrand. You know, I think we would clearly reserve a pocket of $25 million-$50 million of additional OpEx if we think that that was useful for our growth initiative, particularly as we're looking to accelerate and do more fiber and new build than what we had budgeted to do back in November. We'll continue to remain very flexible on that side.
In terms of, you know, how we think about, let's call it a new steady state, cost base, and CapEx, base going forward, you know, we've spoken about this in, relative detail, over the course of the last years or so, and we're getting a lot more granular in terms of the affected cost base and CapEx. If you look at just, the overall CapEx budget today and you exclude fiber to the home, and new homes build, you're probably around $1 billion. That $1 billion is about $600 million, which is what we would look at in terms of maintenance CapEx and another $400 million of growth CPE-driven customer CapEx.
If you look at those numbers and you have a 100% fiber network or predominantly fiber network going forward, you know, that maintenance numbers comes down probably about $200 million, maybe up to $300 million. So we're probably on the maintenance side, closer to $700 million than we are $1 billion, prior to any fiber build-out, which will be over. Then it's really about how much we're spending on any extensions of the network, which have been averaging about $200 million, going up to about $300 million this year, given the you know, the acceleration we're doing in terms of edge outs.
That's probably the indication as to what we look like from a CapEx standpoint, going forward, let's call it post-2025 and onwards. From an OpEx standpoint, you know, we have about $800 million-$1 billion of addressable OpEx. You know, OpEx that we could isolate that relates to network and service related issues is about $400 million-$500 million. You can expand that probably to $600 million, depending on how you define things. As you think about really driving reduced OpEx, you're looking at saving. It's hard to guesstimate, but you're probably out there saving $200 million-$300 million easily of that OpEx.
You know, hopefully more as we are seeing already the early returns from reduction of install rates, lower churn numbers, higher ARPU numbers, et cetera, right? You know, we're very confident here that the strategy is here. It's a very attractive return on invested capital. We'll really drive some, you know, very good financial statistics on a steady-state basis after 2025.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Doug Mitchelson with Credit Suisse. Please state your question.
Thanks so much. You know, Dexter, a couple questions. First on, just a follow-up to Brett's question on the fiber installs. I think you said, fiber install times are down to an hour and a half, and I think you said from the customer perspective, so that's probably the in-home, truck roll, right? I'm just curious what's driving the improvement. The reason I ask is I'm just thinking over time, you have to transition more and more of your workforce from installing HFC to installing fiber. I know in the past you indicated there was, you know, a need to train. I'm just, you know, how quickly do you think over the next couple of years you're gonna have to move more and more workforce into the fiber side?
Do you think you have that locked down where that training or the improvements that you're making are scalable? That's the first question.
Yeah. I mean, you know, what we used to do in the initial days of fiber installs is have one truck roll for the whole day, right? Which looked for the full drop into the home from the OLT and an entire installation process in the house. Now, what we do is we do the drop ahead of time so that the final drop into the home is what the install process and the customer faces. You know, it's an extra half an hour relative to HFC, 40 minutes relative to HFC because you're actually dropping, you know, a new distribution wire into the home and working with the homeowner as to where to drop that into and through what side.
Could be a drill into the side of the home. Could be just a drop into their garage. You know, I think that's what takes the additional time, is to identify really the geographical location as to where you're gonna drop the fiber into, which drops into the gateway. Then the whole distribution of the gateway over and the installation of the Wi-Fi takes just a little bit longer than through HFC. You know, we continue to see improvements as people get trained more and more. We do believe we have the right balance today in terms of training.
We are heavily recruiting more internal workforce to be able to keep those on standby as the key fiber installers and not subcontract all of that out. You know, we are ramping up those efforts commensurate with what we expect the ramp-up to be in terms of the amount of installs. You know, we're pretty well-oiled machine today after fits and starts over the last couple of years here in particular with COVID as well on there. In terms of just, you know, delivering new homes passed here, you know, we had a big permitting issue in the state of New York. That we believe has been solved. That's about 400,000 or 500,000 homes that will be released.
We are well on track in the Connecticut footprint to upgrade our entire Connecticut footprint to fiber this year. Also, I have been working very closely with the state of New Jersey. We're on track to deliver our you know, approximately 1 million fiber homes this year. Hopefully, we'll do better than that in the Optimum footprint. Then we're also starting to launch 200,000 fiber homes in the west as well.
Great. That's helpful. On the second question, on the wireless side, I was just hoping you would compare and contrast sort of the wireless, you know, strategy now versus last time. The reason I ask the question is I feel like through the pandemic, perhaps, you know, a little bit of less of a retail focus, more of a greater ability to facilitate through digital sources. But I'm sure there's other dynamics as well that perhaps you think is different. Just curious there.
Well, I think when we launched, we went very digital-first, in terms of strategy. Unfortunately, the U.S. market still remains not that adept at a digital-first, type of distribution of mobile. Retail and inbounds continues to be the bulk of our sales on mobile. You know, that's one of the reasons why we're aggressively pushing out our retail network. We've got 75 new stores set to open this year. We've already opened up 10 this year. We'll continue month-over-month to continue to increase that. Just getting better at the entire sales effort through the call centers, as well, both in retention, and in straight marketing side.
You know, we feel good about where we are today, particularly since we've got our new T-Mobile agreement that we think is very attractive and will, you know, allow us to be very flexible in terms of how we think about our offers going forward. As our distribution footprint continues to increase, we're optimistic that we'll continue to be able to push that. It's really just a thought process around, you know, a digital-first strategy, which did not work very well given the complexities in the U.S. market on mobile with handsets and with porting and with SIM changes.
You know, those three things are not necessarily very normal activities, let's call it, for the U.S. consumer relative to other markets that we've seen, which some, you know, they're very, very well in tune with all three of those things. You know, pivoting into a more traditionally distribution-oriented side, we see is going to do us well on the distribution of our mobile product.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Kannan Venkateshwar with Barclays. Please state your question.
Thank you. Dexter, maybe on the first question is on the churn stabilization that you talked about. As you've gone through this process of stabilizing the base, could you give us some insight into why people were leaving? Was it the product? You know, was it a desire for symmetrical fiber speeds? Was it marketing or price or something else? What has changed in terms of retention strategies or, you know, is it merely just upgrade to fiber or something else? If any insight on that would be useful. On the subsidy side, you know, the subsidy that you got in Arizona, could you just give us a little more sense of what you can use that money for and when the money starts coming in?
I mean, can you use this, for instance, for extensions, edge outs, or do you have to do this as a new build? When does the money start coming in once you do the work? Thank you.
On churn stabilization, I mean, you know, there is less activity in the market, you know, as people require obviously broadband to be working 24/7, all the time. I think people are a lot more patient with their providers than they have been historically. But also obviously the improved customer care metrics that we've seen, the continued investment in the network plays into it. You know, a big majority of our churn comes from voluntary because people are switching over to another provider for either price reasons or performance reasons, right? You know, there's nothing particularly differentiating that's driving the churn reductions other than old-fashioned good service and good network performance is allowing.
Obviously from a behavioral standpoint, people are, I think, a little bit more cautious about switching providers, given how they need their service to be working nonstop. If it's working very well, what's the point of changing? On the subsidy side, typically the money comes in when we deliver the homes passed. Each RFP, by the way, does not look like the next one. Each community looks at different things. Some may look for, to your point, line extensions. Primarily, the number one desire is to get symmetry of at least 100 Mb of symmetry.
You know, a lot of the cable providers who do not provide FTTH buildouts are a little disadvantaged relative to operators that are providing FTTH rollouts, particularly on the symmetry side. We've seen instances where cable providers will say, "Listen, I'll do 1 gig, but I only can do, you know, 50 on the upstream." They fail to get the contract because they want symmetry. You know, as we basically have committed on each and every one of our subsidy RFPs to go after to deliver fiber to the home, which has been a very successful strategy, and we think we're gonna continue to have good traction on that going forward.
I can't tell you what the rules of the game are in every single one of our applications because each application looks very different.
Got it. Just as a follow-up, I mean, is activity around subsidies big enough to offset some of the CapEx pressure potentially next year or the year beyond once this starts scaling?
No, this is all incremental CapEx to it. If you think about it, you know, these are underserved or unserved markets. The cost of building out typically is prohibitive historically. The subsidies help to make it relatively attractive to be able to be the only provider in certain markets that no one will want to ever overbuild because it's prohibitive to kind of create a second network out there. This is incremental CapEx. This is not synergistic CapEx. There are situations, to be fair, where we are able to upgrade backbones or head ends or extensions with subsidy money because it allows us to hit these underserved or unserved markets, and it's part of our responses to RFPs.
By and large, this is all incremental CapEx.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Chaplin with New Street. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to touch on ARPU for a second. Dexter, I joined a bit late, but I heard you say that you expect ARPU to grow for the year. It's
No, it's just I was just questioning about broadband ARPU, Jonathan. You know, Craig asked about broadband ARPU. You know, our broadband ARPU has grown from quarter-over-quarter, and we think that we will continue to be able to grow that.
Yeah. My question on broadband ARPU, Dexter, is whether, given the pressures you're seeing on subscriber growth and the competitive environment intensifying, whether that's the right strategy right now. Whether on the cable business, you know, where you're deploying fiber, you've got a phenomenal product for all the reasons that you've articulated, and you can price that product at a high level because it deserves it. In markets where you're competing with cable, does it make sense to be pushing price in those markets given the competitive intensity that you're facing?
Yeah. We're not pushing price. Well, maybe taking one step back, Jonathan. You know, we look regularly at what our competition is, and we are definitely not price leaders in terms of pricing over our competition, right? You know, where we do compete against a Fios, as an example, you'll see regularly right now there's a big differential of, you know, $20+ depending on what product you're taking, and we're gonna narrow that gap with price adjustments. We're never gonna be more expensive or even on par. We've always been pretty much slightly below Fios historically. As we launch fiber, you know, that may change over time given that we probably will have a superior product for a bit of time.
In the West, you know, this is something that we monitor very closely. You know, some of the fiber providers are very aggressive and come in and price very low price points to try and monetize their network. In those cases, we obviously tend to address that much more in retention than in changing overall of our promotional efforts. We want to try and keep a unified marketing strategy across products and price across our entire footprint, but allow our local teams to be flexible relative to retention or other types of add-ons to the extent we see competitive pressures there. You know, we are not looking to push price or push ARPU based on pushing price.
It's really, you know, we're seeing ARPUs increase because our customers are mainly taking the 1 gig product. You know, 49% of our customers are taking 1 gig. On fiber, I believe that's 56% or 57% of our gross adds are taking 1 Gb today. That is driving naturally to the higher ARPU numbers.
Right. Dexter, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your promo pricing in Verizon markets is lower than Verizon, but your rack rate is higher. I'm wondering if it's maybe the step up from promo to rack rate which is making competitive dynamics more difficult. We've seen sort of most of the fiber providers go to flat pricing for broadband over the course of the last couple of quarters, and I'm wondering if that's hurting you guys competitively.
It's a very good comment, Jonathan, because that's literally like three presentations on my desk about this type of stuff that you're addressing right now that we're being very thoughtful about how we're thinking about, you know, the step-ups in pricing over the next two-three years typically is when the step-ups come in. How we think about price guarantees or whatnot, either for life or for periods of time. I can't comment on it right now, but it's a live topic here that we're dealing with, and we will have a very clear response on this in the next couple of months.
Got it. Thanks, Dexter.
Thank you. I'll now turn the floor back to management for any closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining. Do let us know if you've got any further questions, and I hope to speak to you soon. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a great day.