Hello, everyone. It's Nick Brown here from Altice USA. Thank you for joining, and apologies for the slight delay. We had a technical difficulty with our operator. In a moment, I'll hand you over to Altice USA's CEO, Dexter Goei, and our CFO, Mike Grau, who will take you through the presentation, and then we'll have time at the end for Q&A. As today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements, please read the disclaimer on page two. Dexter, over to you. Hello, everyone. I'm going to start today by summarizing the Q3 results and then provide an update on our strategy and accelerated investment plan. Starting on slide three, revenue growth in the third quarter was 5.8% year-over-year, with continued strong recovery in news and advertising and business services. Adjusting for anticipated regional sports network credits which impacted revenue last year, revenue growth was 2.3% this quarter. Further adjusting for an incremental $69 million of AirStrand revenue, which was recognized in Q3 for early termination of a backhaul contract, revenue growth would have been closer to flat for the quarter. Broadband customer net losses were 13,000 in Q3, which is a bit better than I previewed in September, as we finished the quarter better than expected and puts us approximately flat for the year. As I will go deeper on our plans to return to growth later in this presentation, I do want to reiterate here what we believe is just a temporary customer loss driven by a couple of reasons. First, we're still operating in an unusual environment where the effects of the pandemic have not yet fully normalized, particularly in our unique Optimum footprint surrounding N.Y.C. Second, going forward, we'll see some more benefit from our accelerated pace of footprint expansion, Optimum fiber upgrades, and additional Suddenlink network upgrades. Back to the numbers, adjusted EBITDA grew 3.4% year-over-year with a margin of 45.2%. We delivered another strong quarter of free cash flow at $389 million and just over $1.3 billion year-to-date. As I previously flagged, we reduced the pace of share purchases in Q3 to $79 million as we are shifting to invest more aggressively for growth, now targeting up to $1 billion of share purchases for the year. We have also updated our financial outlook for 2021. We still expect to grow revenue and EBITDA. For CapEx, we now expect to be at the low end of our prior guidance range at $1.3 billion, which is consistent with the free cash flow for the year of approximately $1.6 billion and net leverage of 5.4. Looking at our Q3 revenue growth in more detail on slide four, you can see the adjustments I mentioned for the quarter and year-to-date more clearly. Recall last year, we booked RSN revenue credits of $79 million in Q3 and a further $19 million in Q4, relating to rebates from the RSNs, primarily due to a shortened baseball season during the pandemic. Residential revenue grew 2.2% in Q3, but declined 1.9% adjusting for RSN credits. Business services grew 21.7% in Q3 on a reported basis. However, excluding the RSN credits and $69 million of AirStrand revenue I mentioned, business services was up 2%. Note, we expect to record approximately $30 million of additional AirStrand revenue in the fourth quarter related to the same contract. Finally, news and advertising grew strongly again, up 15.7% in Q3, supported by strong recovery across local, regional, and national advertising. On slide five now, focused on our residential business. We reported a net loss of 25,000 residential customer relationships in Q3 and a broadband net loss of 13,000. As I flagged in September, we saw fewer gross additions than usual in the back-to-school period, and move churn remained elevated in our footprint during the quarter. If the level of gross additions and move churn was more in line with the third quarter of 2019, we estimate we have shown positive broadband net additions much closer to 2018 and 2019 levels. Additionally, in the quarter, we disconnected about 3,000 customers that were previously affected by the prior hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, as some customers here have never returned. I want to highlight that we have seen growth year-to-date at Optimum in non-Fios areas and across Suddenlink, which has been consistent with 2018 and 2019 levels. Where we're seeing losses is only in Optimum areas where we overlap with Fios, so we're focused on addressing this isolated issue. As things stand, we still expect to return to broadband customer growth in Q4 and therefore grow slightly for the full year. Turning to slide six on business services, revenue trends continue to recover as SMB customer growth has been stronger this year, reporting at +2.6% growth in Q3, excluding AirStrand revenue. You can see we're building back up to pre-pandemic levels of growth. Business reopening activity has been accelerating as vaccination rates increase and community restrictions continue to relax. We are also seeing retail and commercial office space vacancy rates continue to improve as well as schools reopening. With respect to Lightpath, we saw a slight decline in the quarter of less than 1% as the company saw some one-time legacy contract renewal impact. As we've announced Lightpath entering into several new markets recently, we expect the newly expanded sales team to deliver an acceleration of growth here in the coming quarters. On our news and advertising business on slide seven, we saw strong growth again this quarter, up 16% or almost 22% ex-political revenue as we continue to annualize the negative impact from the pandemic last year. Local, regional, and national advertising markets all continue to recover, which we expect to continue. One notable exception is the auto segment, where there's some market pressure. Ex-autos, our news and advertising revenue was up 37% versus Q3 2019 levels. While we continue to expect advertising revenue to decline in Q4, given the tougher political comparisons, we now expect revenue for the full year will be slightly up on a year-over-year basis, given our performance to date has been ahead of our initial expectations. On slide eight is an overview of strategic measures we are announcing today to enhance the company's network, product portfolios, and customer experience on an accelerated basis. First, we are significantly accelerating our fiber network rollout. With a more differentiated broadband service, we expect to drive higher gross additions and help reduce churn, given the reliability of the fiber network service. Our long-term network maintenance and technical service costs should also fall. We are further accelerating our new build activity, edging out the Suddenlink footprint to drive customer growth. In the near term, to support the return to cable broadband customer growth ahead of getting the full benefit of our accelerated network benefits, we have rolled out new, more competitive offers recently, where we're starting to see traction. We are accelerating investments in mobile and converged offerings, which will be available from early next year and will help improve broadband customer churn as well. On the customer experience side, we're looking to expand sales and distribution channels to pre-pandemic levels to support additional customer growth. More generally, we're making investments to improve the customer experience, including reorganizing our call center setup. Lastly, as we start seeing more material improvements in our operational performance based on the above initiatives, we will pull the trigger on rebranding Suddenlink to Optimum to drive a consistent marketing message and customer experience across the country. Before digging into some of these strategic initiatives in more detail, I want to give an updated snapshot of our footprint on slide nine. We have a total of 9.2 million passings across 21 states with Optimum legacy Cablevision businesses in the New York Tri-State Area, representing about two-thirds of our total footprint. We compete with Fios across the majority of our Optimum footprint. This is where our FTTH rollout has been focused so far, and you can see from the zoomed-in lens, we've covered about 25% of the Optimum footprint with fiber now. We have upgraded the rest of Optimum to DOCSIS 3.1 hybrid fiber coax that offers up to 10/1 Gb speeds, and the plan is to expand the FTTH rollout to many of these areas as well. Furthermore, within this footprint in New York and New Jersey, which are our largest states from a customer perspective, remember, we were disproportionately impacted in the last year by the respective executive orders, which were pandemic-related regulatory programs restricting us from normal disconnect policies. We're back to business as usual here now. Texas is our third-largest state and also represents the majority of Suddenlink business. Here, we have been focused on new build activity, including expanding into three of our top five fastest-growing communities in the country. Household broadband penetration across the Suddenlink states is also below the national average at about 80% versus just over 90% in the New York Tri-State Area. This is our biggest growth opportunity today. Finally, it's worth noting that North Carolina is now our sixth-largest state following the Morris Broadband acquisition, which is making way for much more new home build opportunities as well. Turning to slide 10, I first want to summarize how our prior network upgrades since we've owned the Optimum and Suddenlink businesses over the last five to six years, has significantly widened the availability of higher broadband speeds. When we started, very few customers had access to speeds greater than 100 Mb ps. As of today, 1 Gb speeds are available to 92% of our footprint. This has helped drive an increase of more than sevenfold in the average broadband speed taken by our customers from less than 50 Mbps at the end of 2015 to just under 350 Mbps today. Our 1 Gb penetration has now reached 13%, but given that our 1 Gb sell into new customers where it is available is almost 50% right now, this represents a significant growth area for us. About half of our customer base still only take speeds of 200 Mbps or lower. We have a lot of runway here too. Clearly, as our FTTH coverage expands on an accelerated basis and we make multi-gig services available, we expect the average speed taken by customers to continue to step up materially beyond what our competition can offer today. On the left of the slide, you can see we are on track to reach 1.5 million FTTH passings by the end of this year, which is an increase of over 500,000 year-over-year, with customer fiber penetration right now at about 5%. Remember, we saw a slowdown in our FTTH rollout last year due to pandemic-related restrictions, but we're looking to significantly catch up next year with a target for an additional one million new fiber passings to reach 2.5 million fiber passings by the end of 2022. This includes continuing to upgrade areas where we overlap with Fios, as well as completing the vast majority of Connecticut by the end of next year. Additionally, we're planning to expand our fiber investments into areas of Suddenlink with approximately 100,000 homes targeted for fiber upgrades next year. On the right, you can see we're on track for at least 150,000 new homes built this year, mostly edging out around Suddenlink footprint, with Morris Broadband inorganically adding another 90,000 passings. We are still achieving above 40% penetration after the first year of expanding our network into new areas. It makes sense to push harder here in adjacent areas as a great driver of our new customer growth. Right now, we're targeting an additional 175,000+ passings in 2022. Separately, we are continuing to upgrade existing HFC homes in the Suddenlink footprint in areas where customers previously only received a maximum of 160 Mbps, taking this up to either 400 Mbps or 1 Gbps. We're on track to deliver over 300,000 upgraded homes here by the end of the year, at the higher end of which we were targeting, and we've already commenced additional upgrades which we will complete next year. Moving to slide 11, last month, we announced a new sales approach with our Optimum FlexAbility offers. New and existing Optimum and Suddenlink customers now have the freedom to pick and choose the internet speed, TV package, or mobile data plan they want. Whether selecting a single service or adding together multiple services, customers can change their services at any time, whether they need to adjust their internet speed, TV lineup, or mobile data plan. We've also simplified the pricing and billing with no extra fees and no annual contracts. Most recently, we've been bundling free streaming services such as HBO Max with our Optimum Stream product and offering more generous gift cards on promotions to be more competitive. While these new offers may weigh on our revenue growth near term, we believe this will improve our product positioning, value proposition, and customer growth. Optimum Mobile has approximately 181,000 mobile lines as of the end of September, reaching 3.9% penetration of Altice USA's residential customer base, with revenue in Q2 up 3.9% year-over-year. We expect to re-accelerate growth here more materially from the beginning of next year as we launch more integrated conversion offers and deploy more marketing dollars. Slide 12 illustrates clearly how we pulled back on sales distribution channels during the pandemic, necessitated by stay-at-home orders and social distancing protocols. In retrospect, we've been too slow in getting back to pre-pandemic levels here. We estimate that this cost us about 60,000 in gross additions this year when compared to what these channels delivered for us in 2019. Which likely means we could have seen growth in customers instead of losses this quarter and mitigate the various headwinds we've seen. On the left, you can see we're targeting approximately the double number of door-to-door sales representatives we have in 2022, up to 400-500. On the right, you can see we're looking to add approximately 50-75 new retail stores in 2022, which is also a key driver of mobile sales in the U.S. Speaking more broadly about customer experience improvements, we're making additional investments into our call centers and field services to reduce friction points in customer interaction. Once we are happy and seeing significant improvements in our operational performance and customer experience, we will move ahead with the rebranding of Suddenlink to Optimum. All of these strategic initiatives are areas that I and the telecoms leadership team have been spending a significant amount of time on reviewing, and I'm very optimistic about our ability to execute against these targets. With that, I'll now hand this over to Mike to go over financials and outlook in more detail. Thank you, Dexter, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much for joining us today. Turning to slide thirteen, you can see our adjusted EBITDA margin was 44.2% year to date or 45% ex mobile, which is slightly ahead of 2019 levels. Remember, we did have some temporary savings last year, so 2019 is a better comparison. Our EBITDA less CapEx or operating free cash flow margin of 33% year to date was also ahead of 2019 levels, although slightly below last year, driven by increased network investments. I should highlight that some of the areas Dexter mentioned where we are increasing investment will include higher operating costs as well as higher CapEx, which will likely negatively impact margins in 2022 to drive better customer growth and higher medium to long-term revenue and cash flow growth. We expect to give more granularity here with our full year results as we are just finalizing our budget right now. We are taking measures to mitigate the impact on 2022 EBITDA and leverage to support this higher investment as we believe it's the right thing to do for the business. On slide 14, you can see our capital intensity was 12% this quarter and 11.2% year to date. Without fiber and new home builds growth investment, this would have been closer to 7% in Q3. Dexter outlined the main components of our increased CapEx target in 2022, which totals between $1.7 billion-$1.8 billion on a cash basis, including $300 million of additional FTTH CapEx and $150 million of additional new builds CapEx. For 50-75 new retail stores, this will cost approximately $50 million of additional CapEx next year. We still see the same opportunity to reduce CapEx longer term once our fiber build is complete. We're just trying to get there quicker now. Slide 15 highlights the annual free cash flow trends. We had another strong quarter of free cash flow generation in Q3 at $389 million, reaching over $1.3 billion year to date, and we've given a new free cash flow target of $1.6 billion for this year. Remember, we have exhausted our tax NOLs, so cash taxes have been higher this year and our CapEx increased year over year given the restrictions we had in 2020. Looking forward, it is likely free cash flow will be lower again in 2022 with the accelerated investments that we're planning to drive growth. Thereafter, we remain confident in our ability to grow free cash flow again through EBITDA growth, reduced CapEx, and lower interest costs. Slide 16 shows our CSC Holdings leverage trend since the acquisition of Cablevision completed in mid-2016, when net debt to EBITDA was closer to 7x. You can see we've been trending to our 4.5-5x leverage target in the last few years with a couple of exceptions, being the $1.5 billion dividend we paid in mid-2018 in conjunction with the spin-off of Altice USA and the $2.3 billion tender offer at the end of last year following the Lightpath minority stake sale. We remain committed to reduce leverage to this target range, even as we are accelerating investments to support all of our key strategic initiatives. This will include reducing the pace of share repurchases and paying down debt in the next year, as we showed in Q3. That said, it is worth noting that our balance sheet right now is in really good shape. As of today, our $2.5 billion revolving credit facility is completely undrawn, so we have a huge amount of liquidity on top of our very healthy level of free cash flow generation. The weighted average of our debt is currently 6.4 years, and our weighted average cost of debt remains at 4.7%. 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. We will continue to proactively and opportunistically manage our liabilities in the same way as we've done in the past and still see plenty of additional refinancing opportunities. Lastly, on slide 17, we summarize our updated financial outlook. We still expect to grow both revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the full year. Our medium-term leverage target, as I was just highlighting, remains unchanged at between 4.5 and 5 times. However, in light of our slower than expected customer growth, we are now likely to land at 5.4 times at the end of this year, in line with the current level. We expect cash CapEx for 2021 to come in at the lower end of our prior guidance range at $1.3 billion, before increasing to between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion in 2022 to support our accelerated investments. Our free cash flow target for 2021 is $1.6 billion. We've reduced our share repurchase target to less than $1 billion in 2021, having acquired just over $800 million year to date to accommodate higher near-term investments in the business. As Dexter has commented previously, we will look to be opportunistic as it relates to use of excess free cash flow, including in the way we evaluate any potential additional share repurchases. With that, we will now take any questions. Your first question comes from the line of John Hodulik with UBS. Okay, thanks. Two questions, if I could. First, just I guess, Dexter, I know you wanna hold off on giving guidance till fourth quarter, but just maybe at a high level, could you talk about the ability of the company to grow EBITDA next year? You've got a lot of spending in front of you, and obviously, it's gonna take time for those revenues to restart. So just anything you could say on that would be great. Then to your point on ARPU, I think you know, at a recent conference, you talked about the change in ARPU trends, and we've seen the high-speed data ARPU slow down over the last couple of quarters. With the new pricing, do you expect that trend to continue? There was actually a sequential decline in high-speed data ARPU. Do you think we're gonna see, as we look into fourth quarter in 2022, high-speed data ARPU actually go negative on a year-over-year basis? Thanks. Hey, John. On the first question, you know, we are gonna give a lot more guidance since we're right in the middle of our budget process, right now, as we talk about fourth quarter earnings. It's probably safe to say as we look at it, given the more one-off nature of the AirStrand revenue, and some increased expenses going into next year, that we will see some decline in EBITDA. On the ARPU question, you know, listen, you know, we're not necessarily hyper-focused on the levels of data ARPU here. You know, what we've seen is even with our more aggressive pricing since just after Labor Day, our gross add ARPUs have been just slightly down relative to our historical levels over the last 12 months. You know, we're seeing people spend more. The attachment rates have been good on video and we're seeing the tiers in terms of speeds, people taking higher speeds on entry levels. You know, we feel good about the continued levels of sustainability of our existing ARPU levels. Given the roadmap of our product on data as well as the fact that 50% of our customers still are at 200 megabits or less, we think we'll continue to be able to grow our high-speed data ARPUs. Great. Thanks, Dexter. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone. Your next question comes from the line of Brett Feldman of Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking the question. Thank you for giving us so much transparency here on what you're looking to do. I'm sure you expect that as you execute against this, there's gonna be an opportunity for the market to sort of revisit how it's looking at the stock. Mike, as you pointed out, the company still has a lot of liquidity and a lot of flexibility in the balance sheet. Dexter, previously, you had indicated that you were also thinking about ways to use that balance sheet to drive shareholder value other than just through executing a strategic initiative. I was wondering if you can maybe give us a little more insight into how you're thinking about that, including some specific things like maybe going private, which you had alluded to before, and whether it makes sense over the long term for this collection of assets to stay together or whether you think you might be able to open up shareholder value by revisiting that? Thank you. Brett, I think, listen, I think the management team and the board is singularly focused on operations right now and making sure that we're being thoughtful around our balance sheet, no matter what. To the extent we need to reinvest more of our free cash flow into investments and capital allocation decisions that make sense for the business, we'll do that. If that means putting to the back burner some of our share purchase initiatives, so be it. As long as we're focused on doing the right thing for the business, we'll do that in making sure that we're operating as a standalone business across the board. You know, we're of the opinion that you never say never to anything. So, you know, to the extent that there was something interesting that came up or some type of transaction that made a lot of sense, we're always willing to listen to outside parties and pick up the phone. There's no initiative here to split up the assets to try and highlight the underappreciated value of certain of our footprint here in order to try and maximize value in the very short term. You know, this business has gone through a slight flutter for three or four quarters on its gross add numbers, and that's it. We feel very comfortable in the ability for us to recover those losses. We've got all the initiatives in place to do that. You know, our October numbers were in line with our 2018 and 2019 October numbers. You know, it's early days. Our November numbers look good as well. It's just about executing. We're very focused on execution here, and we'll see about any of the other noise that may come into the system, whether it comes to our balance sheet or strategic initiatives. Thank you. Your next question [crosstalk] comes from the line of Jonathan Chaplin. Thanks, guys. Wondering if we can talk about the aspirations for the fiber build beyond next year. Would you continue building at that one million homes a year clip until you get all of the Optimum footprint done? Or are you just trying to get to the areas covered by Fios, which I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is about three million. I guess to add to that, is there no opportunity to go faster on the builds, Dexter, given that you're sort of pulling back on share repurchases? We're looking at guys with much less experience than you in deploying fiber in markets that are much more scattered than yours scaling up to one million a year next year. You know, wondering if you can't go faster, is it a capital allocation decision? Is it because of labor constraints out there? Supply chain constraints? What might be holding you back? Jonathan, on 2023, I don't wanna anticipate what we're gonna be doing. You know, it's clear that in our minds, we're going through an accelerated CapEx initiative for at least two years, which is 2022 and 2023. That will, as you rightly mentioned, cover most, if not all, of our fiber footprint by 2023. We will have done other parts of the Optimum footprint, which are non-fiber, which are strategic for us as well. We will have scattered, you know, a couple hundred thousand plus homes around the southern footprint, which are very strategic to us as well, right? I'd anticipate us to be anywhere between 3.5-4 million homes passed in fiber by the end of 2023. Thereafter, we're just gonna be opportunistic in terms of how we think about things. I don't think there's anything other than that. You know, we clearly have worked aggressively to bring down our install times going into 2022. We think we have a material improvement in those install times, which leads us to accelerate our gross adds, including migration, next year. Then we'll start seeing what we've been anticipating, which, you know, we're already seeing, you know, 80% better network resilience and lower incident rates on the network, on the fiber to the home relative to HFC in those zones. You know, if we see anything statistically close to that or even meaningful around those numbers, yeah, we'll maybe revisit our CapEx and think about doing more. But right now, very, very focused on getting to that 3.5-4 million homes as quickly as possible, getting the benefits of the OpEx savings, better customer experience and longer term CapEx savings. Thereafter, we'll look at it from there. In terms of our ability to go faster, it really is a question of how much money you wanna spend, and resource constraints, right? With a lot of people fighting for the same resources, you know, you can just get into a bidding war for resources because it's critical for you to spend no matter what you want to spend. On building out faster homes. In certain areas, it's really just resource constraints, you know. You are talking about scattered homes all over the place, but they're, you know, our Suddenlink footprint is very scattered. We're not looking to upgrade to fiber all over Suddenlink today. It's really about the Tri-State area here. In the Tri-State area, we compete against a lot of resources, right? There's ourselves, there's Charter, there's Fios, there's Frontier. So you know, there's quite a few. There's a couple other operators out there, and so there's quite a few operators fighting for resources, plus all the enterprise businesses that are in this area that are fighting for fiber resources. So, it's a little bit of a food fight from a resource standpoint, but you know, we've got our internal resources that do a big part of our construction and maintenance and installation process. We've got two or three longer term serving subcontractors which are you know, raring to go here. We feel very good about our ability, putting permits aside, of being able to deliver our one million homes next year. Got it. Thanks, Dexter. Your next question comes from the line of Philip Cusick from JP Morgan. Your line is open. Hey, guys. Thanks. A couple, if I can. This year we're gonna do rolling price increases rather than a single major one. What's the status and track record of that? Are you still ramping up price increases? At Goldman, you mentioned that ARPU might grow more slowly next year, still in the mid- to high-single digits. Do you think that's still reasonable? Then second, on the Sprint deal, that $100 million early termination with them, it sounds like they're walking away from the AirStrand. What does that do to your backhaul or sorry, your wholesale deal and your efforts in wireless going forward? Thanks. On the rolling prices, we're gonna continue with that strategy. You know, historically, when we've done one large rate event and then people in addition have their rolling rate events that occur as they step up closer to rack rate levels over two to three years, people get hit with, you know, two, sometimes three rate events historically. That has been something that has been very troublesome for our customers as well as puts quite a lot of pressure on our care system. We like the rolling rate action plan that we have. We will continue doing that into 2022. We've had the best retention of rate action in 2021 based on the rolling actions that we're doing. We're gonna continue doing that, going forward. On the ARPU growth, you know, listen, it's too early to tell where we're gonna end up. As you saw, we're closer to 3.5%-4% broadband growth here in the third quarter. We'll see where we are for next year. Obviously, we've got a roadmap here that takes us to much higher speeds, going forward. Maybe in 2022 as we are more aggressive promotionally, driving for higher growth, you know, potentially in 2022, you'll see some more flattish ARPU on the data side. On the T-Mo side, you know, this is T-Mo's decision to reposition some of its mid-band spectrum here for its 5G strategy. This was part of the contract to the extent they wanted to take down the AirStrand that we were contracted to do that for them at these levels. You know, we've already been rehomed on the T-Mo network since the beginning of this year. The performance has been great. We're very happy. The service levels have been great. The customer experience has been great. You know, hence our churn levels have pretty much halved in 2021 and look to continue. What it does for our wholesale deal? Our wholesale deal remains intact. We've been in discussions, I think I previewed this before, with our partners at T-Mo, for a more flexible deal for both sides. You know, when we get there, if we get there, we'll announce something. We're confident that ourselves and T-Mobile will find something that's attractive for both of us, and we will continue our long-term partnership. Thanks, Dexter. Your next question comes from the line of Craig Moffett from MoffettNathanson. Your line is open. Yeah, hi. Dexter, I wonder if you could add a little color to your thoughts on the broadband market. Last quarter, you talked about weakness in market growth. I think what a lot of people are trying to suss out, not just for you, but for the whole cable sector, is what here is competitive and what here is a function of whether it's low-end consumers dropping off, whether it's slower new household formation, whether it's something in the college markets. What are your thoughts looking across your footprint and the differences that you're seeing in competitive markets versus non-competitive markets that give you insight into what's happening in broadband? It's a good question because there's so many different, let's call it geographic peculiarities, depending on where you're looking at. I think broadly speaking, it's fair to say, competition is increasing across the sector as overbuilders pop up and as players such as AT&T start aggressively rolling out their own fiber networks. I do think that there's less activity out there, which is driven by obviously one, you know, churn levels are lower, which is driving less competition for gross adds, which is leading to less gross adds in general. There's less activity out there, which is impacting numbers. Net-net, the net numbers should be by and large in line with each other. It's just gross add numbers are lower than historic levels. I'm not sure that we're reverting back to as much activity on the gross add side as we have historically, other than the fact that we are seeing more competition, I think broadly speaking, in the sector. Our net numbers outside of the Fios zones are in line, bang in line with where we were in 2018 and 2019. You know, I don't think there's any peculiarity in the college markets worth talking about. Yes, we had a peculiar 2021 back to school. Obviously the pandemic year was, you know, you can't read any trends into 2020. I think, you know, campuses by and large, if you've got teenage kids, Craig, you know, I've been out there on campus hopping, and it looks like back to normal. So, you know, I think I think we are going into a post-COVID era pretty much across the country. Activity levels are high from a commercial standpoint. We're seeing it on the SMB side, a lot. It's just I think we are seeing a little bit more competition out there, and I think, given that non-paid churn levels are coming down, we are seeing less activity on the gross add side in general. But net-net, net add numbers look solid in terms of following historical trends. Then you've got to look at each pocket of competition, one versus the other. I do think that some of the competition, at least in terms of what they're saying, some of the smaller players or some of the newer players that are, you know, or reformed newer players out there, I think their targets are ambitious in terms of the ability for them to build, the ability to get out there as quickly as they anticipate, given the labor market shortages and how tight it is there in certain areas, given the permits that they have to go through. You know, I'd be surprised if people start delivering upon their targets that they've been announcing verbally out there. I do think some of the smaller player overbuilders are gonna start struggling here on the capital side, given that, you know, there's wage inflation, there's construction inflation, there's permit delays. Our pre-levels are more aggressive. Marketing spend and media dollars are going not as far as before. Retail presences and local market engagement are important. I think the whole cost structure of some of these smaller players, which we don't necessarily run into across the board, is something that's a little bit challenging for them relative to some of the larger players who've got economies of scale. It’ll be interesting to see how the market unfolds over the next two or three years. I don't anticipate some of those guys surviving in the current formats. That's helpful. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of James Ratcliffe from Evercore. Your line is open. Thanks. Two if I could. First of all, just on housekeeping, was there any cost associated with the Strand contract cancellation? Secondly, more generally, it sounds like the underlying driver of the subscriber weakness has been that you guys have been losing out to Fios for growth adds in areas where you overlap with them. How confident are you that—I mean, building fiber in those areas would certainly, you know, bring you to product parity there, at least on the upstream issue. How confident are you that the additional share that had been picking up has been driven by product differentiation rather than just aggressive promotions and being cheaper? On the housekeeping side, you know, practically 100% EBITDA margins there, so very, very high margin product on that. On the second point, listen, you know, it's clear that if you look across our internal statistics, where we're seeing pressure is in our Optimum Fios zones. Everything outside of that is seeing at 2018 and 2019 growth levels. You know, what has also impacted us is the lack of distribution, where we've impacted ourselves about 60,000 gross adds in 2021 with our retail store depletion, as well as some of our sales efforts depletions. Looking specifically at the Fios zones, there's a couple things. Number one, they obviously have a mobile strategy and product and mindshare, which is significantly higher than ours across the board. They're extremely promotional on double playing both their fixed and mobile offerings together. Something that we have not been able to do historically, one, because we had an inferior product with the Sprint network. But also because, as we were focused on our product portfolio, the Double Play product portfolio and our ability to mix and match on the Double Play there, was less of a focus. That is a priority on our list today, and that we'll have something to show the market in the first quarter of next year. Outside of that, listen, we think that building fiber puts us in a superior network position relative to them. They are up and down just under 1 Gb on their existing fiber to what effectively is fiber to a coax termination. You know, they need to fix their fiber to the coax termination if they wanna go to higher speeds. You know, we're gonna be 10 Gb ready effectively by the second half of next year across our fiber footprint and have a longer runway here of a product advantage and mindshare. We're repositioning ourselves to be able to duke it out on an equal if not a better product portfolio going forward. I don't think it's only gonna be based on promotional offers, but I think it's gonna be on customer experience and an ability to flexibility in terms of the things that you can do. They're a formidable competitor, and we look forward to continuing to compete with them. We think that what we're putting in place is the right strategy for us to compete on equal footing with them. Thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Peter Supino from Bernstein. Your line is open. Hi. Thank you. First, I wanna thank you for the detail on your net additions by brands and region. That was helpful. On that note, I wondered if you could talk a bit more about Suddenlink. The strategy generally has been to offer very competitive introductory prices and high ongoing retail or normalized prices. I wonder if that is sustainable with fixed wireless and fiber supply accelerating in a targeted way. More specifically, if you could just comment on whether your view expressed last September for slower ARPU growth includes an assumption that ARPU growth in Suddenlink needs to slow down too. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, listen, we continue to revisit, Peter, all the time our rate events actions on our customer base. As you can see in terms of our pricing today currently where we are at 300, 500, and 1 Gb, we are aggressive not only in terms of headline prices but in terms of some of the extras that we're doing, whether it's OTT HBO Max or gift cards or free installs or those types of things. We'll look at the competitive environment to see whether or not we have the ability to push rates on existing customers going forward or not. It is clear that our focus on rate action going forward is gonna be on the video product. You know, not only maintaining parity as much as possible with pushing price increases from our programmers onto our consumers and giving them the choice there, but also focusing on the experience that our data customers are having and not pushing just straight through them. You know, there will be markets. That's clear where competition will be coming in, particularly fiber competition coming in, where we're gonna be cognizant on ARPU rate actions there going forward. Today, we feel pretty good about where we're able to do things from a rate standpoint in which markets and how that we're not previewing, you know, a slowdown, a material slowdown, or degradation in data ARPU. Your next question comes from the line of Michael Rollins from Citi. Your line is open. Thanks, good afternoon. Two topics. First, on the share repurchase topic. The guidance is for under $1 billion this year, and you've done $800 million or so roughly year to date, I think you mentioned. Does that mean that you could or would or have repurchased shares in the fourth quarter? And then just the second topic, just you know, taking a step back on some of the strategic priorities you mentioned earlier. What are your current thoughts on partnering in the industry to push the customer experience forward faster, drafting off of third-party innovation, whether it's for video boxes, applications, the Wi-Fi experience? And have you given any further thought to the possibility of outsourcing or partnering for the video distribution side of what you do and then having Altice focus more directly on the broadband experience? Thanks. On the share repo, you know, I don't think we're being cute. We just gave a headline guidance. I don't think there's any intention for us to be spending that extra $200 million here in the next month and a half. You know, we've been supportive of our shareholders who've done block trades on helping underwrite that. You know, if that occurs, we consider that going forward. That's historically been our trend, where we've taken about 20% of any of the significant blocks that have come out from our shareholders. On partnerships, you know, it's a two-edged sword. We absolutely like to work with partners and often piggyback on the work they've done and the expertise they have. The two-edged sword comes in when we try and modify some of the experience or the technical modifications, specifications, or something to do with app integration onto a box or on our app that we need to go through a third-party partner, and we're always, you know, last in line to get the responsiveness from the respective IT teams and technical teams there. We're a little bit handcuffed. You know, we pick and choose which partners to work with carefully and try to maximize our flexibility, do it at the quickest pace possible at the right prices, right? That's something that we're constantly reviewing. I'll give you an example. You know, we obviously are looking to expand on our Altice or Optimum app experience on video and moving it on to more platforms, not just our own kind of Android box, but you know, we've got a development with Apple TV that's coming on board very shortly, and then looking to other platforms out there where we can start maximizing the availability of the Optimum video app over IP. In terms of disaggregating our video from our broadband, it's very difficult given our programming contracts and how those are set up to kind of separate those businesses. You know, that clearly when we lose the video product as part of our direct control, it creates havoc relative to our subscriber base in terms of the availability of the bundle and the stickiness of our customers and the entire customer experience. You know, I would not be in favor of trying to disaggregate services that could create care experiences and technical experiences that are suboptimal for our customers. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Beale from Arete Research. Your line is open. Hi. Can you talk about the, well, your network upgrade policies in your FTTH markets? Is there a speed tier or a product mix where, you know, the return equation we mean that you automatically upgrade a customer connection to fiber or when do you keep them on DOCSIS 3.1? How does this play along with the promos and mobile product improvements that you're thinking about into the balance of your future net adds with Fios in those competitive markets? One very quick housekeeping question on the $1.7 billion-$1.8 billion cash CapEx for next year, how much vendor financing will be on top of that? What's the book CapEx gonna be? On our fiber versus coax policy, you know, we're not proactively migrating people. People have to ask to be migrated, and also we use it as a retention tool. But we're not proactively migrating people. It's you know, the experience has always been, you know, when you have Mr. Smith who's very happy with the service, you don't wanna mess with anything in his home, nor do you wanna go into his home and start maybe drilling an extra hole into his wall in order to drop your fiber connection. We're not looking to proactively migrate people. I think there will be a time where people will start looking for a multi-gig service or really focused on their upload speeds where they'll want to proactively migrate. We see proactive migrations calling into the call centers in the hundreds today, not in the multi-thousands. Obviously, as we continue to be a lot more marketing oriented around our fiber footprint, that will most likely accelerate. Today the policy is, you know, don't touch what works and people will migrate at their own paces. In terms of promos today, when we're promoting fiber in your area and you've got coax, and for whatever reason you can't get a fiber or for whatever reason your configuration of your household makes it difficult relative to coax to get the best connectivity on your Wi-Fi, you know, the promos are equivalent on fiber versus they are on cable, in terms of the price points for speed tiers. In terms of cash versus accrual CapEx, there's probably a $300 million-$400 million difference between cash and accrued CapEx in 2022. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Kannan Venkateshwar from Barclays. Your line is open. Thank you. Dexter, just, you know, one question, broadly on your top line growth trends. When we look at the industry as a whole, I mean, it looks like customer relationship growth is for the most part driving top line growth because of, you know, overall, revenue parts are declining due to video. Therefore, when you look at your top line growth range in the past, I mean, you know, the 1%-2% kind of a range you've done in residential. In order to get to that, your residential relationship growth would have to accelerate quite significantly as you go into next year and beyond. When you think about, you know, the overall framework for growth, especially as ARPU comes under a little bit of pressure, is that something that we should contemplate for 2022? Or is 2022 a year where because it's ramping, your revenue growth might be a bit more subdued, and it picks up beyond, you know, in 2023 and beyond? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, every percentage point of revenue based on volume is 50,000 adds, right, approximately. When you look at that and this year we're seeing negative customer growth, but flattish to slightly up data growth, we're in a declining revenue trend in the back half of this year going into next year. Now, you know, we are seeing you know the early signs of a better sales and gross adds in the fourth quarter. We anticipate that to continue going to next year. The law of mathematics suggests that we are probably on the B2C side gonna have negative revenue trends going into 2022, which goes into positivity back in 2023. You know, the goal that we've always had was to go back to 2018, 2019 trends for 2022 in terms of data and customer subscribers relationships, and look for to get to triple digit data adds in 2023. If we execute on our CapEx and we execute on the bits and bobs of operational things that we're focused on, whether it be product or service or distribution oriented, I think we've got no doubt that we should be able to hit those targets in 2022 and 2023 from a KPI standpoint, which will, one, address your volume driven revenue growth commentary, and two, compound itself into 2023 nicely, which will drive both back into revenue and EBITDA growth. Got it. Thank you very much. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Mitchelson. Your line is open. Hi, thanks so much. Let me echo Brett's comments. Thank you for all the transparency and detail, Dexter. A couple cleanups, then a question. On mobile, just to confirm, you don't need new terms with T-Mobile to launch what you're planning to launch early next year. I assume that's the case, but just to confirm. No, we don't need new terms. We both want new terms because there's a lot of cleanup post the merger and DOJ, FCC language that both of us don't like working under that. We're looking to clean up something which is gonna be mutually beneficial for both of us, and we're well on our way on those discussions. No, we can continue to do what we're doing without touching anything if we ended up there. I'm almost certain that we won't end up there, that sometime in the next couple of months we'll announce a new partnership. The other cleanup was on strand mounts. Thanks for the revenue disclosures. What's the flow through to EBITDA and free cash flow? Is it 100% margin revenue or is there- Yeah. It's close to 100%, right? It doesn't cost us that much to decommission the AirStrand. My question is on fiber. In the past, and I think you sort of suggested on this call, you think about the build out of fiber, there's a critical mass point where you start marketing fiber more aggressively throughout sort of the tri-state area. Are you evolving how you're marketing and selling fiber now, or is that something a little bit farther down the line? In other words, is it really just the inbounds coming on fiber and you offer on broadband and you offer fiber? Or are you starting to push fiber out into the marketplace in terms of sales? I mean, given that we're starting to finally hit relatively decent critical mass, if you were watching the World Series the other day, you could see our first fiber ads that we're having. We're gonna continue to start slowly but surely be much more aggressive on signaling fiber in the tri-state area. You know that marketing campaign is well underway, both from a local engagement standpoint as well from an advertising standpoint. That will only intensify over the next 12-18 months as we continue to grow critical mass. Okay, thanks. Yeah, my Altice fiber works quite well, but my awareness might have been a little bit higher than the average person. Thanks, Dexter. If you were watching game six of the World Series, I saw the ad several times. You're right. Okay, thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Benjamin Swinburne from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Hey, good afternoon, guys. Dexter, we've been talking a lot about fiber and a bit about wireless, also Verizon's sort of bundling strategy. What do you think is a realistic expectation for us to have about your wireless ramp in 2022? I know you're gonna be opening new stores. That takes time. You got to obviously get the product and pricing right. What should we be thinking? Is that a tailwind to broadband net adds? In 2022, or do you think it takes a little bit longer? I just was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your expectations so we think about it the right way. You guys have been running above your leverage target since you IPO-ed, and I saw it again in the release today, and I guess I figured I'd ask. This time, are you guys planning to get down to that level? That's more of a priority than maybe it's been in the past where you were obviously very comfortable living above it. I figured I'd take a swing at that one since clearly the buybacks have slowed recently. On the first question, listen, you know, we've got the product offering in place. We've held back on the marketing on mobile. We've held back on the marketing of fiber as well as we want the customer experience, particularly the installation process to get better. We think we've halved our installation process timetable, and we've started opening up a lot more quota for fiber installations going forward. We're ready for a significant ramp up where we're doing probably about 4,000 net adds in fiber today per month. You know, we anticipate probably averaging closer to 10,000 a month next year, if not more. On the mobile side, where we have been basically pretty much flat all year as we've just been focusing on getting our churn levels down and our customer experience, you know, we're opening up 25 stores in the next two months, three months by January, and another 50 stores in the third quarter of next year. That whole retail distribution side of the business, which is critical to mobile, is ramping up significantly in 2022. If you look at kind of how we're thinking about the smoothing out of our subscriber growth next year, whether it be on broadband or on mobile, you know, first and third quarters tend to be weaker quarters and second and fourth, better quarters. You'd anticipate to see a back end of the next year as being a nice ramp up for us. As we go into the momentum of all the capital spend going into 2023, which we're really, you know, targeting that triple-digit data growth. We'd anticipate that dragging mobile along with it as well in terms of our ability to drive some further mobile growth. Got it. On swinging for the fences on our leverage, maybe I'll just hand it over to Mike since he's been so silent. Yeah. Ben, thanks for the question. You know, and listen, we've reiterated our leverage target, and we've always pursued that. There were, as we noted in some of our prepared comments, a couple opportunities we've had over the past couple years to do material transactions around shareholder returns, meaning the dividend in 2018 and then the tender offer with the Lightpath proceeds at the end of 2020, excuse me. I wouldn't describe it as more of a priority going forward. We've always been mindful of it. There have just been some circumstances and market conditions that have led us to kinda live at the high end of the target range or maybe, to your point, a little above the high end of the target range. We will continue to be mindful of all our stakeholders as we always have been historically, and we'll look for opportunities to get back into that leverage target range over the medium term. I don't think there's a material change in that regard. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Frank Louthan from Raymond James. Your line is open. Great. Thank you. I just wanna step back and just ask kinda conceptually, you know, what sort of changed with the uptick in the, in the CapEx? I mean, you're going along, you're already building a lot of fiber. You know, the Fios plan was already, you know, in place. So it wasn't like a competitive change there. But what shifted that you felt you needed to make, you know, that step on the gas that much? And is that going along with some of the operational changes that you're trying to remedy now? Thanks. Well, listen, you know, not to go back to product 101, but, you know, it's product, service, and price really driving customer experience. I think on the product side, we feel as if, you know, we need to get the upper hand on products as quickly as possible and have not only the benefits from an OpEx and CapEx from a financial standpoint on a longer term basis, but from a customer experience standpoint needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. What better way to do it than have the best product out there and a differentiating product. You know, I think we're still a ways away from competing fiber to true fiber in big parts of our footprint. We're gonna have the upper hand for a couple of years, and hopefully longer than that in terms of having a much better product experience and customer experience. That's why, you know, it's the right thing for us to be doing for the business. You know, we have had our fits and starts on fiber rollout over the last three or four years because of the intricacies of the permitting process, particularly here in the Northeast is painful in the New York and New Jersey areas. For some odd reason, Connecticut's not painful. Other areas in the U.S., it's not painful either. You know, people able to execute large fiber builds in like Texas is completely different than being able to roll them out in the state of New York, which now the governor's office has a hand in the permitting process. You know, we're very focused on putting in place the best infrastructure which drives the best customer experience as quickly as possible in as many places that make sense for us to allocate that capital. That's the only reason. There's no, you know, if we had been able to execute on our plan as we had wanted to over the last three or four years, we wouldn't have to accelerate our CapEx. We would just spend a lot more historically, and we would have been on a steady state over the next couple of years. We need to ramp up over the next couple of years here to catch up with the underspent CapEx over the last three or four years. Why not focus more of the build outside of the New York area then? I think you said you're, you know, just a few hundred thousand, but if it's easier, why not focus more there? Well, it's easier, but it's in small pockets, right? You know, one of the things about doing large scale infrastructure builds is, you know, ramping up teams to do it, economically and efficiently, over large parts, of your footprint is the best way to do things. When you start, you know, hitting 50,000 homes here and there all over the place, it becomes extremely costly and very, very hard to manage, and disruptive in many respects, in terms of it from an operational standpoint. You know, our biggest competitive threat today, and has been always historically, has been our competition with Fios. We've historically always been, good ping-pong partners of back and forth, 10,000 subscribers back and forth. You know, they've got a product advantage, today, over us. We wanna right-size that product advantage, and be, you know, offensive in the near term. Thereafter, you know, we'll be thinking about where it is that we need to be offensive in other parts of our footprint as well. There's no alarm bells. We are going to look at certain markets in Suddenlink where we're gonna sprinkle some fiber over the next couple of years. We'll probably do 200,000-300,000 homes in the next couple of years, and then figure out whether there's other smaller markets that we need to continue to drive fiber. To your point, we're not ignoring our west markets, our Suddenlink markets. They're just not the priority today relative to our east markets. All right. Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Steven Cahall. Your line is open. Hi, this is Dan Hausman for Steve. On your accelerated fiber plans, you have over one million fiber passings today with roughly 5% penetration. Just wanted to know how fiber gross take rates have compared to your expectations and whether this is giving you confidence to drive lower churn and accelerated net adds on your planned build. Listen, I would've wished to have had more, but there are two things that have slowed down our fiber take rates and where we haven't been pushing it aggressively from a marketing standpoint. One is the install times, when you go true fiber to the home, requires, you know, effective engineering work into your home. That is obviously materially different than a coax install process. The times have been three-four times longer than a traditional HFC install. You know, we have clients who don't have the patience, and it materially changes the economics, if you don't do it within three or four hours or there's repeat installation required. There's a learning process that you have to go through to do true fiber to the home and deliver a good customer experience. We believe we're there, and it's taken us a couple of years to get there. In 2022, I think we're prepared to have a much quicker ramp of our gross adds on fiber. In terms of the customer experience, I think the customer experience has been great, other than one instance where we're on Gen 8 in terms of our gateway. Our Gen 7 gateway, which was initially deployed, it's been unstable, particularly on video. You know, we are upgrading that experience on the Gen 7. You know, the Gen 8 plus the Wi-Fi 6 extender experience has been phenomenal on both 1P and 3P. You know, our churn rates, if you looked at our stats, our churn rates versus HFC on Gen 8 have rapidly caught up with the HFC churn rates, and I anticipate them to be much lower than HFC churn rates next year already. The Gen 7 will have caught up on the churn rate statistics by the first quarter of next year as that stabilizes that platform. We're in the process of testing new codes, and that's gonna be implemented. I've got no doubt it will be successfully in the next couple of months. You know, we've gone through all the teething pain on installations, on permits, on resources, and now it's all about the customer experience, which is why we're starting to advertise in spots. Obviously, World Series is high profile, but we're gonna start blanketing the market on fiber Optimum. You know, we've got an aggressive budget in 2022 in terms of our penetration numbers. Thank you. There are no more questions at this time. Turning the call back over to Mr. Nick Brown for closing remarks. Thank you everyone for joining. Do let us know if you have any follow-up questions. Otherwise, hopefully see a few of you in the next few weeks as we're back in the office now. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.