January 2023

Lumos is looking to enter its third state as the operator works toward a goal of reaching 1 million fiber passings by 2026. Specifically, it’s planning to spend $100 million to build out 1,200 miles of infrastructure in South Carolina, focusing on the Columbia metro region. The company’s fiber is already available to around 200,000 locations across North Carolina and Virginia. CEO Brian Stading plans to finish overbuilding its legacy ILEC footprint with fiber by early 2023 and thereafter expand into new communities both within the two states and elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region.

As the January 13 deadline looms for states to challenge the current Federal Communications Commission broadband coverage map, many states are asking for more time. I'm starting to wonder, however, whether more time is actually all that important. The FCC process is NOT building a location-level map of actual delivered broadband speeds, but rather a map of the performance that providers say they can deliver if a customer requests it. So let's try to put all of this together and see what it means. For me, a few key takeaways stand out (All of this is not to say that state efforts to understa