dslwanter I’ve also been wondering about why some locations are listed as cities and others are as counties.
So far, what I can tell is that a lot of the Lumos cities listed align with those counties, but not all municipalities within those counties are listed on Lumos’ list. And at least some of the old Lumos city URLs redirect to the T-Fiber county URL. For example, http://lumosfiber.com/local/oh/youngstown/ redirects to https://fiber.t-mobile.com/city/mahoning-co?utm_source=cross-site&utm_medium=lumos&utm_campaign=citypage.
That makes me think that when T-Mobile says “Mahoning Co” and “Trumbull Co,” that it will be select areas within those counties. Not whole cities, but probably just areas where it makes sense for them to bring fiber, either to serve cell sites or areas where Armstrong/AT&T/Comcast/Omni haven’t already built out fiber, so that they don’t have to make the capex investment in highly competitive neighborhoods and streets.
Interestingly, a lot of the cities Lumos listed outside of those counties are not listed as “coming soon” or available on T-Fiber’s website. I suspect that T-Fiber has scaled back Lumos’ plans and will only target areas that they feel will be most profitable, areas ripe for double-play (convert AT&T/Verizon customers to T-Mobile wireless), and maybe along paths to cell sites to dual-purpose their transport fiber for FTTP and cell sites.
The old Lumos city list is actually still online. This list got reverted to show all cities “coming soon” the day T-Mobile took over and switched the Lumos site over to T-Fiber. I assume they captured an old version of the Lumos website that was staged in advance with T-Fiber redirects, and that’s what went live when the Lumos-to-T-Fiber branding cutover also went live.
A few weeks later, they replaced the version I described with the version linked above that shows some of the cities available that were launched under Lumos. Namely those covered by “Akron,” “Mahoning Co,” and “Trumbull Co.” But most of the “coming soon” cities that were in progress under Lumos are reflected here anymore, and other cities like Canton and Stow have since launched under T-Fiber, but aren’t reflected on that Lumos page. I know Stow was also getting built out by MetroNet, which T-Mobile also acquired, so maybe that’s why? I’m not sure who was building in Canton. Anyway, this Lumos list hasn’t been updated since then. As far as I can tell, they don’t intend to maintain this list anymore.
