On this morning’s earnings call, Cablevision chief operating officer Tom Rutledge said the company is on track to complete a fiber ring in the former Bresnan Communications systems by year’s end.
The Bresnan footprint, which Cablevision bought last year, is spread out across Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah. Bresnan’s master headend was located in Billings, and the new fiber ring will give Cablevision better economies of scale. Rutledge said the fiber ring would interconnect roughly 85 percent of the Bresnan customer base.
“Once completed, we’ll be able to essentially manage these geographically diverse systems as one, which will allow us to sell a state-of-the-art triple product across our footprint,” he said.
In the third quarter, Rutledge said the Bresnan properties saw growth in data and voice customers but a “slight decline” in video subscribers, which mirrored Cablevision’s New York-area footprint results.
“Digital penetration is rising as we deploy new and better digital services, and at the end of the third quarter, 75 percent of Bresnan’s basic subscribers were digital,” Rutledge said.
Before Cablevision purchased Bresnan, Bresnan said it hoped to have DOCSIS 3.0 rolled out by the end of 2010.