Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kalief Browder)

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

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

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