Lumos Fiber

About Lumos Fiber

A wholesale fiber Joint Venture between EQT Infrastructure VI and T-Mobile – a leading US wireless carrier – with ambitions to build fiber-to-the-home to millions of households in the United States. In a highly synergistic partnership, the Joint Venture will leverage the robust playbook Lumos has developed for identifying attractive markets, engineering networks, and rapidly executing new builds. T-Mobile will leverage its differentiated retail engine, advertising scale, and high-quality brand to win new customers. The Joint Venture will help bridge the digital divide in the U.S. by rolling out high-speed fiber broadband connectivity to customers without access to fiber today. The Joint Venture will also leverage EQT’s significant experience in fiber infrastructure deployment formed over decades of investing in fiber broadband rollouts globally.

Market trends and drivers

The U.S. Fiber-to-the-Home market is experiencing rapid expansion, driven by a structural shift toward high-bandwidth activities such as remote work, artificial intelligence applications, 4K streaming, cloud computing, and 5G infrastructure upgrades. With total internet traffic growing at an annualized rate of ~21%, legacy hybrid networks are no longer sufficient to meet modern performance needs. Market growth is supported by strong long-term positive market fundamentals, including a large addressable market opportunity to deliver fiber to the millions of underserved homes across the United States, future-proofed bandwidth technology that is able to offer symmetrical upload / download speeds, no buffering, and the lowest energy consumption of broadband technologies.

Investment potential

The investment potential for Lumos comes from continuing to invest in and growing the Company’s core fiber broadband business both organically and inorganically to capitalize on attractive market trends. Value creation levers include further scaling the robust existing Lumos platform and ramping fiber-to-the-home rollout by leveraging expertise gained from EQT Infrastructure’s multiple investments in fiber and digital infrastructure along with harnessing T-Mobile’s leading sales and marketing engine, national scale and brand, first-mover advantage in underserved markets, and access to growth capital to accelerate the deployment of fiber to unserved homes.