Lumos Acquiring ALLO Fiber Network in Joplin, Mo.
Both companies had city approval to build and compete with Cable One
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5, 2026 – Lumos has acquired ALLO Fiber’s network in Joplin, Mo., the companies announced Friday.
The companies did not disclose any terms of the deal. ALLO had previously said it was investing $40 million in its in-progress Joplin build; the city has a population of about 54,000 according to the Census Bureau.
Earlier last week, Ookla had flagged ALLO as especially likely to be involved in the growing wave of fiber ISPs being rolled up by national providers. ALLO operates in more than 50 cities and counted about 700,000 passings as of last summer.
Lumos is owned by a joint venture between T-Mobile and investment firm EQT. It will offer service under T-Mobile’s branding.
During a July 20 city council meeting, Joplin City Council approved Lumos’s request for rights-of-way access, allowing it to start building in the city. ALLO’s project had been approved in 2024.
“It seems like we put one fiber in and everyone wants to come here, so this is great,” Josh DeTar, a member of the city council, said at the meeting. “I appreciate the competition and all the good things that you all bring.”
He and others said the city had some issues with citizen complaints about the ALLO projects.
With ALLO’s assets under its belt, Lumos will compete one-on-one with Cable One, the incumbent ISP in Joplin.
ALLO pulled out of a similar build in Boulder, Co. in June. The company said rising labor and material costs, plus increasing competition, made its project untenable.
The ISP was leasing city-owned infrastructure as part of the deal. Boulder City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde said at the time the city would be trying to find a replacement and “exploring our legal options in this unfortunate contract situation.”
Lumos representatives are planning on updating the Joplin City Council on the deal during a meeting Monday evening. A slide deck Lumos is planning to show argued fiber was more reliable than cable, and said the company would work to avoid striking existing utility lines as it continued expanding its network in the city.
The slide deck said Lumos’s construction teams were “committed to leaving our service areas as neat or better than they were before we started.”
“We look forward to welcoming customers to Lumos and continuing the work to bring reliable, high-performance fiber connectivity to more homes and businesses across the community,” Scott Mispagel, CEO of Lumos Fiber, said in a statement.
Lumos is one of several fiber ISPs T-Mobile has acquired through joint ventures. Ookla’s report last week found Lumos accounted for about 14.8 percent of the wireless carrier’s fiber subscribers based on its speed test data.
T-Mobile last reported its subscriber numbers at the end of last year, and it had about 1 million fiber subscribers at the time.
ALLO customers will transition to Lumos at the end of 2026, according to ALLO’s website. The company said customers' bills won’t change before then, and that ALLO would follow up with more information in November.
