Hello, and welcome to the Altice USA Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants will be in listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Nick Brown. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining. Today we're joined by Altice USA's Executive Chairman, Dexter Goei, and CFO, Mike Grau. We're delighted to introduce our new CEO, Dennis Mathew, who together will take you through the presentation, and then we'll have time for Q&A. As today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, please read the disclaimer on slide two. Dexter, please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. Kicking off with a summary of our third quarter performance on slide three. Revenue declined 7% year-over-year, mainly driven by pressure in our residential and advertising businesses, as well as the loss of AirStrand revenue in the prior year after the termination of our legacy Sprint contract. Excluding AirStrand revenue, the revenue decline would have been just 4.3% year-over-year. Q3 adjusted EBITDA declined 18.1% year-over-year, with a margin of 39.9%, or down 12.7% excluding AirStrand revenue, reflecting both the revenue decline and higher Opex to drive future growth.
Residential broadband customer net losses were 43,000 for Q3, which was relatively in line with the losses in Q2 as a lower market activity environment and current competitive pressures impacted the pace at which our growth initiatives are materializing. Free cash flow remained solid even with our elevated fiber investments, generating $136 million in Q3 and $535 million to date. Our Optimum fiber network deployment continues to accelerate, rolling out at the fastest quarterly pace to date, adding 321,000 new fiber passings in the quarter. We also added 31,000 fiber customers in Q3 and expect to continue to grow at an accelerated pace through both gross additions and migrations of existing customers to our fiber network.
We continue to advance the pace of our new builds and expand our sales distribution channels, including the opening of several more Optimum stores across the country, both of which support future customer growth. Finally, I'd like to welcome our new CEO, Dennis Mathew, who formally joined us exactly one month ago today. Before I turn it over to Dennis, I want to share that leading Altice USA has been the most rewarding experience in my career, and I could not be prouder of what we accomplished together thanks to leadership and the thousands of dedicated employees across the country who enthusiastically serve our customers and communities every day. The decision to step away from the CEO role at this time was a difficult one, but based on personal reasons as my family and I would like to move back to Europe.
Having found Dennis to take the reins at Altice USA, I couldn't be more optimistic about the company's future, and I'm confident it is in good hands. Dennis is a great operator with a proven track record, an exceptional leader and team player, and in just a few short weeks has acclimated incredibly well across the Altice leadership team, frontline workforce, and broader organization. As we look ahead following the transition period we're in now, I will remain involved as Altice USA's executive chairman with a focus on strategic opportunities for the company. With that, I'd like to hand this over to Dennis to say a few words about himself.
Thanks so much, Dexter. You know, I'm very excited to join Altice in the role of CEO at this important juncture for the company. I see immense potential to further connect with and serve customers while elevating the company as the broadband provider of choice. By way of background, I have nearly 18 years of experience at Comcast, previously leading some of the company's largest regions in the East Coast, most recently with the Freedom Region, which includes areas of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Northern Delaware. My goal is to position Altice USA as a best in class broadband provider with a focus on operational excellence and customer experience.
You know, in my first 30 days, I've had the opportunity to spend time on the ground with frontline teammates, hold deep strategy sessions with the leadership team here, and meet employees throughout the organization, discussing areas where we can deliver a stronger employee and customer experience. I'm proud to lead such an innovative company that has the right vision and long-term strategy centered on investments in fiber infrastructure and a superior customer experience. I'll give you more of an update on where we are with fiber and the new build initiatives in a few moments, but first I'd like to hand it back to Dexter to take you through the headline Q3 performance in a bit more detail.
Thank you, Dennis. Moving to slide four, showing revenue trends in more detail. Total reported revenue in Q3 declined 7% year-over-year, mainly due to a decline in our residential business of 4.4% and our news and advertising business, which declined 16.1%, which I'll come back to in a moment. Total revenue was down 4.3%, excluding about $75 million of prior year AirStrand revenue. In Q4, we'll have another $36 million of lost AirStrand revenue year-over-year. Remember, we had approximately $120 million of AirStrand revenue for the full year in 2021, which we will not see in 2022. Business services revenue in Q3 was down 16.8% year-over-year on a reported basis, but flat excluding this AirStrand revenue.
Turning to slide five on Q3 customer trends in our residential business. We report a net loss of 50,000 residential customer relationships and broadband net loss of 43,000. While we typically see seasonal return to school benefits in Q3 when comparing to Q2, we're still experiencing higher competition in parts of our footprint. It's clear that fixed wireless broadband has taken some of the growth in switchers out of the market in the past few quarters, given the growth from these operators, as well as some localized pressure from fiber overbuilders. This is on top of the ongoing generally lower market and move activity and some households moving back to mobile-only solutions since the pandemic.
We firmly believe that we're on track to improve these trends and return to broadband growth through our growth investments, inclusive of our fiber deployment and multi-gig speed launches, customer experience improvements, new build expansion, and distribution channel investment. Separately, we continue to see positive trends in our mobile business, adding 5,000 mobile lines this quarter, which is a slowdown from the previous quarter as we discontinued some of our service promotions. Slide six is an overview of our business segment revenue. Revenue declined 16.8% in Q3. Excluding AirStrand revenue was flat year-over-year. Similar to our residential business, the SMB market is also seeing some impact from incremental competition, and revenue for the quarter was also impacted by a carrier price down in our entire enterprise business.
Once we lap the AirStrand revenue impacts, we are still mindful that an economic slowdown may delay a more material pickup in growth here. SMB and other revenue was flat ex AirStrand in Q3, and Lightpath revenue grew 0.5%. Lightpath recently announced an additional footprint expansion with the entrance into the Miami market with a 135-mile fiber network build. Lightpath's entrance into Miami will kick off with a 55-mile subterranean network of brand-new high count fiber that will be ready in early 2023. This comes as the second major East Coast market that Lightpath has entered into over the past 16 months, following Boston in June of 2021. Slide seven is a summary of our news and advertising business performance. Revenue was down 16.1% in Q3, driven by a couple of factors.
First, some of the expected political revenue for this year will be more weighted to Q4 than Q3 for us. Second, we had a couple of larger non-political campaigns contributing to revenue in the prior year, which did not occur this year. In addition, we continue to start seeing some campaign cancellations at the end of the quarter as the ad market retreated given the macroeconomic environment. As one of the bigger drivers, we are starting to see auto spend pick up, although it is slow in recovery. Now I'd like to pass it back to Dennis to update you on the fiber build and the new build expansion.
Thanks so much, Dexter. You know, I'm a big believer in fiber as the best broadband technology that exists today, so that's a key tenet of the Altice strategy, which I'm very optimistic about. With that in mind, I'm very pleased on slide eight to present a current snapshot of our progress with our fiber build and customer trends. We've released an incremental 321,000 fiber passings during Q3, reaching a total of 1.9 million passings. This is the highest ever number of additional quarterly fiber passings Altice USA has ever achieved. We expect fiber passings in the fourth quarter will be at a slower pace as we experience colder weather, which tends to slow down the construction, but we'll end the year well over 2 million cumulative fiber passings.
At the bottom of the slide, you'll see our quarterly fiber customer net additions, which also accelerated to 31,000 in Q3 as we've been marketing the fiber product across a wider footprint, supporting gross adds, as well as doing voluntary migrations of existing customers. At the end of September, we had a total of 135,000 customers on the fiber network. To support our fiber strategy, Optimum recently introduced symmetrical 2 gig and 5 gig fiber internet speed tiers for the first time, which is significantly faster speeds than our main residential competitors. Multi-gig speeds are now offered across all of Long Island and Connecticut and will be available everywhere we have fiber by Q1 2023. Importantly, let me highlight some stats that underscore the long-term benefit of fiber.
Fiber trends indicate a significantly better experience for broadband customers on our fiber network compared to our customers on our HFC network. Specifically, we're seeing meaningful NPS improvements, 12% higher ARPU, and about 5-6 percentage points of annualized improved churn benefits. This makes us even more optimistic and confident in our fiber play and expectations for growth. On slide nine, you can see the company added 52,000 new build passings in Q3 and 152,000 passings year to date, putting us well on track to add approximately 175,000 passings organically this year. You know, we're mostly edging out the legacy Suddenlink footprint, and we're consistently achieving over 40% penetration after the first year of expanding our network into new areas, which is a key driver for new customer growth.
Additionally, broadband subsidy programs will enable us to accelerate new builds even faster in the coming quarters. We've received awards for 35,000 new homes year to date, totaling $44 million. In Q3, we were awarded 9,000 passings in West Virginia and 2,000 passings in North Carolina. We'll continue to actively apply to additional grant programs, and we're excited for the opportunity to be a trusted partner to local governments to bring broadband to unserved and underserved communities. You know, slide 10 illustrates the long runway we have to sell faster and faster broadband services that can support high levels of future data usage. The average download speeds customers take across our total base was 391 Mbps as of Q3. Our fiber customers are taking twice these speeds on average.
Our 1 gig customer penetration increased to 19% in Q3, which continues to grow every quarter. Around 42% of our customer base have speeds of 200 Mbps or lower, which represents a big opportunity to keep selling customers to higher speeds, especially as we market multi-gig speeds on our fiber network more broadly. Average monthly data usage for broadband-only customers was 576 GB in Q3, mostly driven by video streaming. In Q3, about 15% of our base of broadband-only customers are using more than 1 TB of data per month. Within our fiber base, about one-quarter of our customers are using more than 1 TB of data each month. Fiber is the best technology to support this growth trend toward increasing data usage demands, which positions us really well.
With that, I'll hand it over to Mike to review the financials in more detail.
Thank you, Dennis. I do wanna add to the warm welcome. We're certainly very happy to have you join us here at Altice USA. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to pick it up on slide 13 with a summary of our financials for the quarter. Our revenue declined 7% year-over-year in Q3, with adjusted EBITDA declining 18.1%. Excluding AirStrand revenue from the prior year period, total revenue was down 4.3% and adjusted EBITDA down 12.7%. On a year-to-date basis, excluding AirStrands, revenue is down 2.8% and adjusted EBITDA down 9.5%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was just under 40% in Q3, which reflects higher operating costs as part of our investment plan to drive better customer growth and higher medium to long-term revenue and cash flow growth.
Our cash CapEx was up approximately 60% year-over-year, driven by increased fiber investments. This all contributed to a 46% reduction in our EBITDA less CapEx or operating free cash flow. Slide 14 is an overview of our CapEx. Capital intensity was 20.6% in Q3, up from 12% in the prior year quarter. Without fiber and new home builds growth investment, capital intensity would have been 10.5%. Year to date, we've spent about $1.4 billion of cash CapEx. Our full year target remains between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion on a cash basis. Remember that after a couple years of elevated CapEx to support our accelerated fiber rollout, we do expect to start seeing significantly reduced CapEx once we start scaling back the build.
Turning next to slide 15, which shows a bridge of free cash flow in the third quarter. Free cash flow for the quarter was $136 million and was $535 million year-to-date, which is lower year-over-year, given all of our accelerated growth investments. Note that excluding our investment in FTTH, free cash flow would have been over $1 billion year-to-date. Our cash interest payments were $348 million in the third quarter, which is slightly higher than previous quarters given recent rate increases, although 77% of our current debt is at a fixed rate. Cash taxes were $30 million in Q3, and we do not expect any material cash tax payments in Q4.
Lastly, other financing activities reflects continued debt paydown amounting to about $114 million for the quarter. We repaid the $650 million 5 7/8 notes in September with our revolving credit facility and have been subsequently paying down the revolver with excess free cash flow. Finally, on slide 16, I want to highlight again that our debt maturity profile is well positioned with termed out maturities following prior refinancing activities. We have no annual bond or term loan maturities greater than $1 billion before 2025, all of which can be covered by either free cash flow generation or capacity from CSC Holdings revolving credit facility without any need to access the credit markets.
If you recall last quarter, we entered into an amendment to our main CSC Holdings revolving credit facility, extending the approximately $2.5 billion maturity to July 2027 at a rate equal to SOFR plus 2.35% per annum. At the end of Q3, we had liquidity of approximately $1.4 billion on top of maintaining a healthy level of free cash flow generation. The weighted average life of our debt is currently 5.8 years, and our weighted average cost of debt is 5.1%. Again, we remain very well positioned in our debt maturity schedule, and we will continue to proactively and opportunistically manage our liabilities as and when we think it is appropriate to do so. With that, we will now take any questions.
Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to be placed into question queue, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing star one. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question today is coming from Philip Cusick from JP Morgan. Your line is now live.
Hi guys. Thank you. Dennis, welcome aboard. Dexter, thanks for your help. You know, Dennis, I thought maybe it would make sense to start, first of all, with, you know, what do you see in the first month, opportunities and threats in the Optimum versus Suddenlink markets? I can't help but follow up on your comment about fiber being the greatest technology, given your recent history at Comcast, where the company is very wedded to the DOCSIS path. Can you think about out loud how the companies maybe are in a different situation? Or do you think this is sort of an inevitable move toward fiber over time? Thank you.
You know, thank you so much for the questions. Over the last 30 days, I've been deeply focused on strategy and budget sessions with Mike and the executive leadership team here and meeting the various teams and employees across the whole business. What's clear to me is that the company's made a lot of progress in setting a strong foundation for best quality broadband through the deployment of its fiber strategy, the launch of multi-gig speeds and the rebrand to one brand. I'm really a big believer that fiber is the best technology that exists today. That's a hallmark of the Altice strategy that I'm actually very optimistic about. As I look ahead, I think we need to focus on disciplined execution and customer experience in order to maximize our investments and to return to broadband growth.
I do think that there are areas where we can accelerate, such as with our go-to-market strategy, aligning our product portfolio. I'm looking deeply at our packaging and our offers and how we can continue to ramp up sales and marketing machines to get us back to sustainable growth. I'm looking forward to working with the team to make that happen.
Any further questions, Phil?
You know, I guess if I can follow up there, as you look strategically at the business, any thoughts of your own on the process of selling Suddenlink, which was out there for a little while? I know the credit markets are a little tougher. Is that still in process?
You know, I'm gonna pass that to Dexter, who's involved in our strategic initiatives, so I'll let him.
Yeah. I mean, Phil, we, you know, we've been pretty consistent on these calls and saying that we'll update the market when we have something to update the market on. I think it's fair to say that we're getting to a place where the decision's pretty imminent as to whether or not we're going to do something or not on that. But I won't comment any further than that, and we'll update the market appropriately.
Thanks, Phil. Operator, next question, please.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Craig Moffett from MoffettNathanson. Your line is now live.
Hi. Thank you. Dennis, let me add my congratulations, and Dexter, let me add my thanks for working with you over the past few years. Two questions, if I could, and I'm gonna stay with some of the same themes. First, Dennis, I guess, what's your early thinking about broadband pricing? Dexter, you said a while back that you were taking a strategic look at your pricing strategies. I wonder, as you come in, Dennis, how you think about the broadband pricing situation at Altice and what you think the prospects are to continue to grow ARPU, which essentially was down this quarter fairly significantly.
Second, I know you can't comment too much on a possible Suddenlink transaction, but can you at least discuss the thinking behind potentially selling it in parts rather than all of it? Is that driven by where the demand side of the market is, or was that something you saw about pieces that you wanted to hang on to?
I'll again let Dexter address the Suddenlink piece. On the pricing, this is part of my assessment as I go through the budget process with the team. I'm looking at rate card. I'm looking at the offers we have in the marketplace, and how we can evolve our go-to-market strategy. That's a critical area of focus for me. I'm looking at our pricing opportunities with fiber as we continue to deploy fiber. As we solidify our budget, we'll be taking a deep look and making some decisions quickly.
Craig, I think on the Suddenlink side, I think that was being responsive to inquiries we had received, in terms of the size of the overall operation and the disparate nature of the geographies. We had some inquiries along pieces of it as opposed to the whole thing, across, you know, multiple players. We were being responsive that way to a piecemeal versus a whole company solution.
Thanks.
Thanks, operator.
Our next question.
Thanks, Craig. Next question, please.
Our next question is coming from Doug Mitchelson from Credit Suisse. Your line is now live.
Thanks so much. Sorry for harping on the M&A side, but I'm just curious, Dennis, if you have a perspective on the strategic importance of smaller markets versus larger markets, not necessarily the Suddenlink process itself, but just over time. You know, a lot of experience at Comcast, they had, you know, all sizes of markets. Typically, we think about, you know, cable as a scale business, but obviously in the New York footprint, you have super scale, and the economics can be different. I mean, do you find, you know, larger markets more attractive than smaller markets or anything interesting there. Then separately, you know, Dexter, I know, you know, focused on strategy. I think what we've been hearing the last couple of quarters is focuses on debt paydown. You're obviously still free cash flow positive.
You know, is there any flexibility for tuck-ins, or should we continue to think that while you're going through the fiber, you know, overbuild, you're hunkering down and focused on debt paydown? Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Our speakers will be rejoining us momentarily. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Our speakers will be rejoining us momentarily. Now rejoining the speaker line.
Sorry about that. It didn't have anything to do with the question. Our apologies.
Well, that gives me a chance to add, you know, Dexter, hope you enjoy the stronger US dollar as you move to London and Dennis [audio distortion]
It clearly has not escaped me that the timing may be good.
I'll add my welcome to the rest for you, Dennis. Look forward to working with you.
Thank you.
Did you guys catch my questions or should I repeat them?
No, we didn't. I'm sorry. Please just give us those again, Doug, that'd be great.
Yeah. Well, I'll give you the shorter version, just for the audience. I'm just curious, Dennis, your view on strategic importance of small markets versus large markets. You know, cable is a scale business. At the same time, you have super scale and the Optimum footprint. So not Suddenlink in, you know, specifically, but just curious the economics of small markets versus larger markets and where you might focus over time. Then, you know, Dexter, as you think about strategy, I think the last couple of quarters, I think the discussion has been more focused on debt paydown than having flexibility for tuck-ins or small deals. Is that how we should think about it going forward? You're still free cash flow positive. Just curious where your M&A focus will be. Thanks.
I've got as an operator, I have experience in working in both. My footprints have included very small markets as well as large markets. My focus right now is looking at our go-to-market strategy and how do we address the needs of those disparate markets in the right way. I'm excited about our strategy and where we're headed. As I go through the budget process again and build our strategy for 2023, I'll be taking a close look at how we are addressing both and how we can continue to have a customer experience lens as we move forward.
I think on M&A strategy, I don't think there's much to comment. You know, we've been pretty reactive on certain things, whether there are assets like tuck-ins that are available, or additions to some of our other verticals, that we would look at. You know, I think that there is a whole host of things that we would look at, that are on our plate, some that you may expect and some that you may not expect. I think at this point in time, there's no need for us to talk about the art of the possible. You know, there are things that we probably will talk about in the near future in terms of things we're thinking about.
All right. Thank you both.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is coming from John Hodulik from UBS. Your line is now live.
Great. Again, welcome to Dennis and congrats to Dexter. Maybe we could talk about the broadband market. I guess you talked about a couple of things driving the current trends, and maybe you could talk about the difference you're seeing in terms of competition in the Suddenlink markets versus the old Cablevision markets. Then you know, I guess, Dexter, you said that you saw the typical back-to-school benefit. I guess, are you suggesting that without the back-to-school benefit the trends would be worse as we look into fourth quarter?
Lastly, as you look out to 2023, you know, based on the trends you're seeing on the fiber side, do you think that we can get to the point where we get back to growth sometime during the year next year? Or is that something we'd expect more in 2024? Thanks.
Yeah. Maybe taking the entire question on, you know, what are we seeing in terms of competitive dynamics and how our KPIs are evolving in our markets. I think it's still some of the same which we've been commenting on Q1 and Q2, which is clearly we're seeing effects from FWA that's been out there, fiber overbuilders primarily in the West, but we do obviously have Frontier who's grown in the East in a small part of our footprint in Connecticut. So that remains the same. I think the geographic dynamics remain the same as well, which is on the East side we have lower gross add activity and on the West side higher churn activity than we have seen historically.
We've seen a little bit of the same as we saw in Q2 versus Q3. You know, we go through to your point about back to school, I don't think it's fair to talk about a unique period of time where, you know, the whole year evolves in terms of unique periods of time, in terms of how things evolve. In Q2, obviously, we have a big churn issue in the West relating to university towns and whatnot. Effectively, you know, Q2 to Q3 was pretty much flat quarter over quarter sequentially in terms of the performance.
I will say we've seen some stabilization in October relative to the run rates that we saw in Q1, Q2, and Q3 that are a lot more attractive than we've seen for the balance of the year initially. You know, the work has been fast and furious for the past 12-18 months. We continue to do a lot of work, obviously, on the fiber build and the new build and our investments on distribution and care. It's a question of time relative to your question relating to 2023. I'll let Dennis go through obviously the budget process and comment on that when we get into Q4 earnings.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Jonathan Chaplin from New Street Research. Your line is now live.
Thanks. I'm gonna follow up on that question, if I may. I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of context for what the trends look like in Suddenlink versus Optimum, whether you're losing subscribers in both markets at the moment. One is a function of churn, as you mentioned, Dexter, and the other is a function of lower gross adds, and whether sort of the trajectories are equally challenged. I'd, you know, to sort of pick up on a question that's come up a couple of times for Dennis, what's gonna get the business back to subscriber revenue and EBITDA growth from here? You mentioned that there was a strong foundation that's already been laid.
Is it sort of just playing out the strategy that's been put in place already, or do you see big changes that are required as a function of your strategic review, that you'll sort of implement to get back to growth? Thanks.
Jonathan, I think on the trend side, trends are improving. I think the overall macro commentary of lower gross add activity in the East, higher churn in the West, remains overall the same. You know, we are losing subscribers in both the East and the West on a year-to-date basis. Again, you know, we are seeing some rays of sunshine coming in, and that's just really about the investments that we've continued to do throughout the year and all the various things that we've spoken about between care, distribution, rebrand and other technological things. You know, I think the trends are the same, but they're moving in the right direction.
From my perspective, in the first 30 days, I've seen the investments that have been made, and I see the impacts. I'm bringing my operational experience and customer experience lens now. I've had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of our teammates, spend time in our front lines, and I don't think it's necessarily a significant change in strategy or further investment, but I do think that we need to get focused on process improvements and operational efficiencies. I think that I'm getting some great feedback from our teammates themselves on the front lines, and I'm spending time there understanding kind of end to end where there may be some opportunities to continue to evolve our customer experience and deliver great service.
Got it. Thanks, guys.
Yep.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Brett Feldman from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now live.
Yeah, thanks for taking the questions and welcome to Dennis. As some of your cable peers have also seen their broadband trends soften considerably, they've really leaned in hard to mobile, and I think they're increasingly talking about it as a mechanism for pulling through broadband and in particular, advertising mobile as a great way to save money. But of course you have to buy their broadband in order to do it. You've restructured your opportunity to use mobile more significantly through the new T-Mobile deal, but you've actually eased off a bit recently, so I was hoping you could give us your latest thoughts on the role that you think mobile can play in helping to get the broadband business back to growth. Just a quick one from Mike.
You talked about how you've been using some of your cash to pay down some of your debt. Your bonds are trading at pretty significant discounts to par. I'm wondering if you're also in the market to buy back bonds or how you think about the opportunity to do that. Thank you.
No, great question. You know, in my experience, I do find that mobile is a great product, especially paired with a broadband product. We are, as you know, continuing to expand our retail presence. I'm having some deep strategy conversations with the team on where we've been with mobile, and I do think there's opportunity that I'm very excited about. We will be looking at our current offers and looking at how we can continue to evolve our bundles and our offer strategy so that we can drive broadband and also drive mobile. Absolutely.
Brett, in response to your second question, certainly very aware of the manner in which our debt is trading in the marketplace. That hasn't been lost on us. We have not to date engaged in any sort of open market repurchases of our bonds. Our debt paydowns to date have been via the revolver, as we alluded to in some of the prepared comments. It's a little bit easier to pull off from a logistical standpoint, and the enhanced liquidity is of value as well. It's certainly on our radar screen and something we'll continue to contemplate. It's something we've contemplated historically. Haven't gone down that road yet, we're very mindful of it.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Michael Rollins from Citi. Your line is now live.
Thanks and good afternoon. I also wanna extend my thanks to Dexter and welcome to Dennis. You know, just stepping back on the future of Altice, I'm curious for each of you how you're thinking about the merits just generally of Altice USA being a public company versus a privately held company.
Second, just following on some of the discussion points on the customer experience, what are the opportunities for Altice in the future to partner to accelerate the customer experience, whether it's for licensing for technology or trying to further accelerate distribution or even, you know, opportunities to enhance bundles? Thanks.
Well, I'll take the first one. I mean, I'd miss speaking to all of you if we were a private company. That would definitely be one of the low points of doing it. You know, all joking aside, I think this is obviously something that hasn't escaped us in terms of our ability to maneuver with more flexibility if in a private context. Those are decisions that are at the board level and shareholder level and not on the table today in terms of our discussions. That is something that you know is an analysis that has been looked at and I'm sure will be looked at again in the future as we continue to go through the budget process and going into 2023.
I don't think there's anything of any relevance to comment on. You know, it's clear that being a private company versus public company has merits in both ways, in terms of the right incentive programs, the capital availability, but also the flexibility to operate more under the radar, and those types of things. That's all I could say today. You know, at some point in the future, maybe there's a lot more to talk about there.
On the opportunity to accelerate customer experience with partnering?
Yeah. This is Dennis Mathew. I'm not sure I fully understand the question here. We have business partners that are supporting our operation across the ecosystem, whether we're talking about call centers and/or installation, repair, et cetera. That's a strategy that we're constantly looking at in terms of the mix and what's the right approach and being able to deliver the right level of quality and managing those partners most effectively to deliver the quality that we would expect. That is a part of the review that's happening as part of the budget process and the strategy sessions and really figuring out the right mix so that we can deliver the best experience.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Thank you. Next question is coming from James Ratcliffe from Evercore ISI. Your line is now live.
Thanks, and congrats to Dexter, and welcome to Dennis. Just Dennis, I'm interested in your thoughts in particular on fixed wireless and how you combat that, because you've been building out fiber, and clearly that gives you some advantages. You talked about the NPS scores improvement there. Your HFC product is already materially better than the fixed wireless product. If that's the competition, how do you combat that as a competitive force? Thanks.
That's a great question, and that's part of what I'm looking at as and as I look at the pricing, as I look at the packaging, as I look at our offers, as I look at our positioning, where we have products available in our sales channels. I do think that we've got a great portfolio of services, especially as we discussed earlier about bundles that we can create with mobile. Looking at all of these tools and assets, we're gonna pull them together so that we can compete most effectively. Fiber in particular, as we continue to drive that and roll that out, I think that's gonna give us the best technology in the marketplace, and so we're excited about driving that as well.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. Next question today is coming from Peter Supino from Wolfe Research. Your line is now live.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask one on churn in the West. You mentioned both local fiber builds and also fixed wireless. I wondered, is the churn problem specifically happening primarily in places where fiber arrives, or is it really a fixed wireless churn problem as well? And then on the finance side of the house, could you please discuss your visibility on 2023 and 2024 fiber build costs per home? I know you had a lot of that forward contracted and wondered when that visibility might roll off. Thank you.
Peter, on the first question, I think it's you're spot on, which is we're seeing higher churn activity, primarily in markets where we're seeing increased competition on fiber side, on fiber overbuilders, whether that be AT&T or some of the smaller players out there. Because if you were able to kind of look at all the other markets where we're not seeing that type of activity, we're definitely not on the same types of trends.
Yeah, Peter, on your second call, this is Mike. In terms of visibility on unit cost per household for the fiber rollout, we have pretty good visibility. I think, you know, there'll be some inflationary pressure, but I don't think it'll be dramatic in terms of labor costs and/or material costs. You're right, you made a good point. We do have locked in certain longer term contracts to procure both the labor and the materials that we need to do that. I think what will drive variability in unit costs will be honestly the mix between build in the East and build in the West. The West build, as we've alluded to.
In previous commentaries will be a little more expensive, both due to lower household density per mile, as well as the fact that we do have a little more exposure to underground in the West than we do here in the East. I think our visibility is pretty good on both of those instances.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Steven Cahall from Wells Fargo. Your line is now live.
Thanks. On the fiber passings, as you continue to accelerate those, I'm just wondering if there's anything that's constraining that growth, whether it's labor or permitting. I imagine you'd wanna pull it forward as much as possible. Maybe you can talk about what the cost per passing you're currently seeing is, excluding CPE. Kind of as a follow-up to that, you're putting fiber into the market. You commented about seeing some fiber coming into your market from overbuilders. When that happens and you see it on offense and defense, how do you think about fiber ARPU versus cable ARPU? Does it put any price pressure into the marketplace, or is it really just competition for net adds? 'Cause we're seeing some price increases across the cable channel.
I'm just wondering if you think fiber impacts those or it's really just a competition for customers and not over price. Thank you.
I think on the passing side, you know, we're going as fast as we can is the overall theme. You know, with that, obviously, we've been doing this in the East for the better part of three years. As you can see in our numbers, we've been accelerating throughout the year. We'll see a little bit of a slowdown due to weather in Q4, but we'll continue to accelerate going into 2023, as we're pretty much done by 2024 on the East. On the West, it's a little bit more not complicated is the issue, but it's just that you're dealing with a lot more disparate geographies. To grow and scale quickly takes a lot more organization and planning.
The limitations are not really about labor. The one limitation that we've seen regularly in the East has been permitting. You know, the state of New York has been somewhat of a bottleneck in terms of permitting. We probably have 200,000-300,000 permits we're waiting on in the state of New York. We've been able to redirect some of our efforts into New Jersey and Connecticut this year, as we await permits in the state of New York. Those are really the only impediments. We do have access to labor. We have access to the raw materials as well.
On the West, it's just a question of time and getting our ducks in a row relative to all the various different communities that are out there. In terms of fiber ARPU, I mean, the overall theme is, you know, our gross adds in fiber tend to generate 10%+ on a higher gross add ARPUs than we see in HFC. When we are fiber versus fiber and offense, defense, as you mentioned, you know, obviously the defensive side to it is materially improves our churn and our gross add profile as we start releasing fiber homes against another fiber overbuilder.
You know, Connecticut is probably a good example of that given that Frontier is built there as we have built as well. That type of competition will be more even-handed. I do think it's less about thinking overall about gross add ARPU. It's about your customer, but I think we are very diligent about thinking about our pricing, and Dennis and the team is very focused on that in our go-to-market strategy. It's not customer at any price, right? We're being thoughtful about pricing. As MVPDs are raising prices, you know, we're going to be obviously thoughtful about our pricing levers as well.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is coming from Frank Louthan from Raymond James. Your line is now live.
Hey, guys. It's Rob on for Frank. You might have spoken to this earlier, but can you guys give us just a you know quick update on your you know how you would rank your capital allocation priorities currently? Then secondly, again, you guys might have touched on this a bit earlier, but you know would you say that you've gotten through you know all or most of the supply chain issues that were keeping you from selling into the fiber build previously? Thank you.
I think on capital allocation, you know, I think we're obviously focused on the investment cycle on fiber and new build. Excess free cash flow, we've been using for deleveraging. You know, where we see the excess free cash flow, we're deleveraging on our revolver pretty regularly. That's pretty straightforward. In terms of raw materials or CPEs related to the fiber side, I think we're well underway. We've got the right inventory levels. We feel very comfortable with the rollouts both on gross adds and on migration, looking to accelerate on the migration side. You know, we've got all of our ducks in a row to be able to do that.
I think the installation process continues to get better and better week over week. The repeat rates continue to get better. The issues that we obviously everyone faces as they start rolling out in the early phases are getting better and better as technicians are getting more and more experienced, right? It hasn't escaped us that if you look at New York, installation process is a lot better than Connecticut and New Jersey because of the time served of our New York technicians relative to our New Jersey and Connecticut ones. Those will get just only better and better as we get into 2023.
Thank you. We've reached the end of our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to Nick for any further closing comments.
Thanks, everyone for joining. Do let us know if you have any follow-up questions. Otherwise, we'll catch up with you in the next few weeks. Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.