Altice USA’s CEO Dexter Goei offered additional details on his company’s plans to launch a mobile service in the first half of next year, including how the cable firm will handle every part of its planned mobile offering outside of running base stations and owning spectrum.

But it was Goei’s comments on 5G—including his response to Verizon’s launch of its 5G Home service—that highlighted exactly how this cable veteran views the wireless industry and how he thinks 5G might impact cable.

5G operators like Verizon and AT&T “have to go out and build very, very deep fiber networks with lots and lots of small cells in order to compete in high speeds [with cable], and in that case that is going to take them an extremely long time to do that before they are a credible threat to the cable industry on broadband,” Goei said in commenting on Altice’s third quarter earnings report.

Further, Goei noted that Altice in Europe has been testing 5G services, which he said gives him direct insight into the technology and exactly what kind of a threat it might pose to Altice’s U.S. operations.

“We know what it can do from a pure physics standpoint,” he said, “and we think what some of the wireless operators are talking about is probably at the far end reach of the realm of reality in terms of what we believe the propagation truly is.”