Lumen is actively expanding its 400G optical network to support growing demands for high-bandwidth services, particularly for AI and cloud applications. This expansion includes deploying 400G connectivity in key markets and enhancing its Ultra-Low Loss (ULL) fiber network, the largest in North America. Lumen has deployed 400G in over a dozen markets, enabling faster speeds for accessing cloud services and third-party applications, according to SDxCentral. The initial rollout includes major markets like Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Phoenix, and Seattle.  

Lumen’s 400G network provides faster speeds for accessing third-party applications, cloud on-ramps, and various on-demand services.  400G connectivity is available through Lumen’s Ethernet On-Demand, Internet On-Demand, E-Line, E-LAN, and E-Access services.   Jeff Ary, VP of product management at Lumen, explained that those combinations of services offer their customers flexibility in selecting how they consume the new capabilities, including through Lumen’s network-as-a-service (NaaS) model.

“We have customers that still want a one-year term in a fixed amount that they pay monthly. We have others that are really liking the NaaS, where they can turn it up, turn it down. But this supports all those customers, whether they want fixed bandwidth speed, fixed monthly amount, or if they want fixed and be able to increase and decrease through our NaaS portfolio, it’ll support that also,” Ary said.  Ary explained that the move builds on Lumen’s agreement last year with Corning to secure 10% of that vendor’s global fiber production capacity over the next two years. “That helped us optimize how we run our optical network,” Ary said, and helped push Lumen’s 400G network reach to more than 90,000 route miles. “That enabled us to put our layer-two network on top of that, to have up to 400-gig on our Ethernet network, which then, of course, helps our IP network as well,” he added.

Lumen is working with multiple vendors for its 400G deployment, including Cisco for the routed optical network, Juniper for the routers in the data centers, Ciena for long-haul optical transport and Corning for the fiber itself. Lumen is also using pluggable optic modules, and as demand increases the company can change out the optical pluggable modules from 400G to 800G or 1.6T, as needed.  Lumen said in February that it would use Ciena’s WaveLogic 6 Extreme (WL6e) 1.6 Tb/s coherent transceiver to support increased demand for running AI workloads, and in May Lumen announced it is working with Corning for a fiber buildout in western North Carolina to expand network capacity in light of  the AI boom.

Dave Ward, CTO and product officer for Lumen, told Light Reading that the wireline network service provider is delivering Internet Protocol (IP) and Ethernet services built on a routed optical network, “taking advantage of all the bandwidth and capacity we have in our fiber network,” instead of using a hub and spoke model where a centralized hub acts as the network core. Lumen is providing the network to transport their data to locations where they want to train AI or develop inference workloads, said Ward.  While Lumen’s network already connects to over 2,200 data centers, this launch provides a 400G upgrade and integration with Lumen Digital, Lumen’s on-demand IP and Ethernet services, according to Ward. 

“With a routed optical network, we get orders of magnitude improvement on capacity that we can now route across our fiber wherever we have fiber available, and it’s two to three orders of magnitude lower cost to deliver a bit,” Ward said. “We’re really trying to build that cloud core and really make that accessible.  It’s really building out those cloud core pieces, and lowering friction and having bandwidth, latency and redundancy engineered paths for our customers,” he added.

“We are partnering not only with the data center operators, but also with the hyperscalers to improve the speeds and access to all of those locations where our customers have their workloads and where they want their workloads and data to be,” said Ward.

Lumen’s overall network provides connectivity to the major cloud providers and 163,000 on-net customer locations. By 2028, Lumen plans to extend its network to 47 million intercity fiber miles.

References:

https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/lumen-lights-400g-connections-to-support-ai-naas-demand/

https://www.lightreading.com/data-centers/lumen-cranks-up-data-center-interconnect-to-400g-for-ai-boom

https://www.lumen.com/en-us/solutions/use-case/artificial-intelligence.html

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