Suddenlink was an American telecommunications subsidiary of Altice USA trading in cable television, broadband, IP telephony, home security, and advertising.

Prior to its acquisition by Altice, the company was the seventh largest cable operator with 1.5 million residential and 90,000 business subscribers.

[3] Classic Communications was founded in 1992 by Merritt Belisle and Steven Seach and the company was taken public on October 31, 1999, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 14, 2001.

[3] Shortly after Cequel III acquired cable systems located in Texas with 27,000 subscribers from Canadian telecommunications provider Shaw Communications.

[14] After Suddenlink completed its acquisition of the cable system from Charter, it focused on upgrading its existing infrastructure that was deemed "under-served" by previous owners.

Suddenlink completed a $600 million debt offering on November 5, 2009, which allowed the company to make significant upgrades.

[23] At the time of the announcement Suddenlink was the seventh largest cable operator with 1.5 million residential and 90,000 business subscribers.

[33] At time of merger with Optimum, Suddenlink operated services in thirteen states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.

The first was with Sinclair Broadcasting Group over two local stations it operates in the Huntington-Charleston, West Virginia designated market area.

After Suddenlink completed its acquisition of cable systems from Charter Communications in 2006, the company entered into a public carriage dispute with Sinclair Broadcasting Group over two local television stations in the region.

During the dispute Sinclair posted a letter on the websites of the two stations and began to notify viewers with scrolling crawl messages on the bottom of the screen encouraging them to switch to another provider like DirecTV or Dish Network.

[34][37][36] Suddenlink subsequently filed an Emergency Retransmission Consent Complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 5, claiming Sinclair failed to negotiate in good faith for the stations and demanded Suddenlink to stop carriage of the two stations during a Nielsen rating sweeps period.

[34] The following day Sinclair also submitted a filing with the FCC requesting the Commission order Suddenlink to cease carriage of its signals.

[34][36] On July 27 both parties agreed to a temporary extension which kept the stations on Suddenlink's systems until August 7 if an agreement was not reached.

[40] Viacom had been involved in notable contract discussion in the past including a media battle with satellite provider DirecTV in 2012 which resulted in their channels being unavailable for nine days before reaching an agreement.

[51][52] After exceeding the data allowance for a particular service plan an overage charge of $10 per 50 GB block is billed to the customer.

[54] By August 27, 2012, the company temporarily suspended its data usage policy while a third party was hired to validate the accuracy of its metering systems.

[56] After Altice completed its acquisition of Suddenlink the company added back unlimited usage plans for its top two tiers only on April 1, 2016.

[60][59] On May 30, 2017, a class action lawsuit was filed against Altice USA claiming that the company illegally changed the terms and conditions of its cancellation policy and did not provide adequate notice to customers.

[58] The lawsuit also claims the company broke New York's General Business Law for deceptive practices and unjust enrichment.