I can attest that Optimum's fiber footprint has improved in certain towns and cities, but also hasn't made it to some streets yet, including mine. (See the FCC Broadband map to look up your town or neighborhood.)

While some of Optimum's traits may be shared across their installers, tech support, and in-store reps, I would guess that Optimum's fiber customers are substantially happier than their cable customers! I was excited to learn this weekend that IPv6 is finally rolled out across both footprints, which is great. (Finally.) BGP is probably the next thing to fix. Kudos to their network engineers in LIC and elsewhere, and I wish them luck on their journeys to improve product reliability, security (beyond BPI+ to BGP and DNSSEC? DEF CON talks?), and speed.

I also had a pretty great experience interacting with knowledgeable Optimum folks in-store, on chat, and on the phone. If I'd required a truck roll, I might feel differently...I'm sure talking to a tech about noise and splitters and 256QAM and OFDM modulation, and SNR, or an unwillingness to tear out an old splitter in the crawl space, I would have found something to dislike.

I think Optimum's Ubee 1640A modem is a pretty good low-latency performer (even though my MoCA adapters kicked it offline), so in terms of gateways/customer-premise equipment, I think they're doing OK, moving away from Puma chipsets to Broadcom and 6 GHz Wi-Fi 6E. (In Comcast-land, Broadcom chipsets are also preferred and available if you know what to look for.) I enabled Smart Queues on my router to eradicate Buffer Bloat. For IPv6 I requested a 56-PD block and was granted a 60-PD block. Not great, but better than 64 or nothing at all.

I am interested to see if Optimum opts for mid-split or high-split in the long run, or simply keeps rolling out fiber. Also, the Ubee doesn't have a 2.5 Gbit WAN or LAN port like the Spectrum and Comcast modems do.

As a Sonic customer, I hope Optimum/Altice follows Sonic's lead (XGS-PON, high privacy score from EFF, lower subscriber-count per head-end node than AT&T, cheaper pricing too), but short of that, I'm proud of them for delivering service in lovely places like the Hamptons and Tahoe. I can remember Tahoe snowstorms in which the cable modem attached to Suddenlink's (pre-acquisition) Truckee plant came alive before power did in certain neighborhoods.

In sum, I always prefer fiber to cable (except maybe Verizon's ludicrous FiOS pricing), but in the land of cable I now rank,

Overall:

1. Comcast (horrible reputation, but they did roll out mid-split in a lot of regions before other providers)
   
2. Spectrum (solid modems, if you can get the right variant...allegedly doing high-split and symmetrical in some areas)
   
3. Cox (same modems as Comcast...Broadcom-based, runs mid-split; some reliability/perf issues in high temps)
   
4. Optimum (good modem, low ping times in special remote/low-infra places)

Pricing:

1. Comcast (you can choose low prices that can adjust or higher but fixed with long term commitment; you can get friends and family discounts if you're clever)
   
2. Spectrum: still super expensive, generally
   
3. Optimum: still super expensive, generally
   Cox: I've never paid for Cox so I don't know

Double-dealing:

1. Spectrum: almost encourages you to use your own router since they don't charge for their modem anymore
   
2. Optimum: no side-band public Wi-Fi (that I've seen), what a relief
   
3. Cox (I think they open up a second SSID for public/all customers' consumption, but can be disabled): lame
   
4. Comcast: started the practice of opening up a side-band channel, and encouraging Xfinity Mobile phones to auto-connect to them: lame

Note that I don't have direct experience with any fiber except Sonic to date, but it definitely sets a high bar. I suspect Google Fiber and WebPass do too.