T-Mobile, Swedish Investor EQT Close Lumos Purchase

WASHINGTON, April 1, 2025 – The Federal Communications Commission approved Monday the T-Mobile and Swedish investment firm EQT’s purchase of Lumos, a regional fiber provider in Virginia and the Carolinas. It was the last regulatory hurdle for the transaction, and the companies announced the deal closed Tuesday.

Considering the companies’ “commitments to accelerate the deployment of advanced services, we find it likely that the proposed transaction would result in some public interest benefits,” the agency wrote.

The joint venture, in which T-Mobile invested $950 million for a 50 percent stake, is part of the carrier’s plan to expand its fiber footprint as fast as possible.

The big wireless providers are looking to bundle fixed and mobile broadband, which appears to keep customers around longer, and that means growing their wireline footprints.

T-mobile’s planning to reach 3.5 million homes with Lumos – which currently has 450,000 passings – by the end of 2028, plus another 6.5 million by the end of 2030 from a separate joint venture that’s still pending. The carrier is planning to put an additional $500 million into Lumos between 2027 and 2028.

All told, the company is looking to hit up to 15 million passings by the end of 2030. Lumos will become open access as part of the JV with T-Mobile as the anchor tenant, meaning other providers could lease capacity and provide service on the network.

“T-Mobile is already the fastest-growing broadband provider in America, and expanding into fiber helps us take the next big step in delivering what customers truly want – faster, more reliable internet that simply works,” Mike Katz, T-Mobile’s president of marketing, strategy and products said in a statement.

Since the carrier is owned by a German firm the deal went through an extra level of review by top law enforcement officials, which gave the green light earlier this month provided the companies agree to certain cybersecurity conditions. The agreement was similar to the one Consolidated Communications entered into last year when it was being acquired by an investment firm.

AT&T, for its part, is rumored to be interested in buying Lumen’s fiber business for more than $5.5 billion, and Verizon is looking to purchase Frontier in a $20 billion deal. Both carriers are busy laying their own fiber, with AT&T targeting 50 million total passings by 2030 and Verizon aiming for as many as 40 million.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said he’s willing to stonewall mergers if companies don’t roll back diversity initiatives, and is currently probing Verizon for not sufficiently doing so. T-Mobile sent the agency a letter signalling it was playing ball and walking back some procurement policies amid a wider review.

“Our proposed transaction with Lumos will result in the formation of a new company that we have determined from its inception will not promote invidious forms of discrimination,” the company wrote in a March 27 filing, borrowing a preferred phrase of Carr’s.