Lumen Sets a New Standard for Enterprise Connectivity Speed with RapidRoutes

Lumen announced Wavelength RapidRoutes—a faster way for enterprises to get the high-capacity connections they need. Enterprises purchasing wavelength services can wait months for provisioning. Lumen’s ready-to-deploy network paths remove delays, guesswork, and complexity when creating wavelength services, and include an industry-leading 20-day delivery service level agreement. This bold approach means more enterprises can scale quickly by slashing the time to turn up services.

“Enterprises can’t afford to wait for critical connectivity,” said Dave Ward, chief technology and product officer for Lumen Technologies. “With RapidRoutes, we’re eliminating the friction—no more long quoting periods or engineering delays. We’re giving customers a simple promise: get the capacity you need, exactly when you need it. With a 20-day SLA for service delivery and speeds up to 400G on prioritized routes across Lumen’s intercity fiber network—with plans to grow to over 47 million miles by the end of 2028—we’re redefining what it means to connect with confidence and speed.”

Built for the AI era, RapidRoutes are pre-defined, high-demand network connections delivering 100G and up to 400G connections for enterprises, hyperscalers, content providers, government organizations and critical industries that need to move massive amounts of data quickly. By removing the need for custom engineering, Lumen can provision prioritized routes almost instantly, making network procurement predictable and effortless.

To help industries move massive volumes of data at faster speeds, Lumen is also aggressively expanding its 400G-enabled footprint to 100,000 wavelength route miles, adding 1.26 petabytes of new capacity at over 300 locations across 25 metro markets. Lumen Wavelength Solutions provide connectivity to more than 125 cloud on-ramps, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and IBM. Combining this scale with pre-engineered routes enables enterprises to keep pace with AI and cloud growth.

Businesses can efficiently scale and manage their networks by quickly adding Lumen wavelength capacity through a portal equipped with AI-driven tools and more than 300 automated workflows. Leveraging RapidRoutes alongside these advanced technologies allows organizations to grow their networks faster and easily adjust their bandwidth.

In March, Lumen and Ciena completed a 1.2 terabit wavelength service trial over 3,050 kilometers of Lumen’s Ultra-Low-Loss fiber network, setting a record for the longest non-regenerated signal at that speed. Using 800G interfaces, they tested and confirmed that the network could support wavelength, Ethernet, and IP services from Denver to Dallas.

Source: Lumen media announcement