Lumos Networks announced that its 1 Gbps service, branded GIGABIT FAST, is now available across its entire RLEC fiber-to-the-premise footprint. The announcement essentially seals a promise the company made in March to reach the buildout goal.
"I am very proud of the fact that not only is Lumos Networks the first service provider of any kind to offer 1 Gigabit internet speeds in our RLEC markets, it is also the first to offer Gigabit internet speeds across its entire RLEC footprint," said Diego Anderson, Lumos' SVP and general manager of its residential and small business segment, in a release.
Lumos started its Gigabit internet rollout in 2015, targeting the Alleghany Highlands region. The company expanded in January to Botetourt County. The company said today it now covers nearly 20,000 premises with its most recent expansion into the Waynesboro/Augusta County market in the Lynchburg area.
"We continue to observe a growing demand for higher speeds to reliably access various data and over the top video content from customers who are using more internet enabled devices than ever before," Anderson said. "This gigabit product delivers superior internet speeds to accommodate these evolving bandwidth intensive applications with the fastest speeds and reliability via a fiber infrastructure."
Lumos sells its Gigabit Fast service starting at $99.95 per month for residential consumers and $129.95 per month for small businesses.
Lumos CEO Tim Biltz said in March that the company was leveraging its existing FTTH deployment to bring 1 Gbps services to rural telco customers. "We have also rolled out 1 Gigabit bandwidth speeds in many of our RLEC markets and plan to have all of them rolled out by the beginning of the second quarter," he said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings conference call. "Our fiber-to-the-premise broadband connection has increased nearly 39 percent year over year and essentially all of these are in our RLEC footprint."
As of the end of the fourth quarter, Lumos had a total of 8,815 FTTH connections, up from 8,007 in the third quarter.
Lumos sells fiber services in 24 markets in Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and Kentucky. The company operates a fiber network of 8,607 fiber route miles and more than 384,000 total fiber strand miles.
Interestingly, the company is exploring potentially spinning out a fiber-centric company by the end of the year that would focus on selling wholesale and retail services to carriers and enterprise customers in its territory.
For more:
- see this release
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