But major residential expansion does not seem to be a key part of the Lumen plan, at least compared to plans for companies like Frontier, which says it plans to pass 12 million homes with fiber.Īnother big unknown is if the company is still trying to sell any of its remaining copper networks like it did with sale of the twenty easternmost states to Apollo Global Management. This doesn’t mean the company might not pursue those opportunities since rural fiber expansion creates monopolies. Unlike the other telcos, Lumen hasn’t been talking much about the upcoming rural grant funding. The company had a target for this year to pass one million locations with fiber but has fallen a little behind due to supply chain and logistics. In August, the company announced fiber expansion plans in Denver, Minneapolis, and Seattle. Lumen is also pursuing a last-mile fiber expansion. While this upgrade will mostly benefit business customers, this also will improve the local fiber backbone in these cities to 100 gigabits, which should improve performance for all broadband customers. This means upgrading local networks to major customers to be able to provide speeds up to 30 gigabits. This newer fiber is far clearer than older fiber and will increase the distance between repeater points while also allowing for using the fastest 400-gigabit electronics today and faster electronics later.Įarlier this year, Lumen announced it is improving its Ethernet architecture in forty cities this year. Lumen will be using two low-loss types of fiber from Corning. While most of the fiber is still functional, fiber glass technology has improved drastically since then. Much of this fiber was built thirty and forty years ago. The original Quest fiber is getting dated in terms of capacity and performance. The network was strengthened when CenturyLink purchased Level 3 Communications. The original network came when CenturyLink bought US West, which had earlier merged with Qwest, a major builder of long-haul networks. The existing Lumen long-haul fiber network came to the company in two acquisitions. This is a marketing trick that long-haul fiber providers have been using for years to make networks seem gigantic. In case you are wondering how there can possibly be six million route miles of fiber in the country – that count is miles of individual fibers. The company’s main fiber strategy is to beef up the intercity network with plans to add six million miles of fiber to existing fiber routes by 2026. In a recent press release, the company announced a major upgrade to its long-haul fiber routes that cross the country. Frontier, Windstream, and Consolidated are all concentrating on upgrading existing telco DSL networks to fiber. AT&T continues to build fiber in selected clusters, mostly in cities, rather than concentrate on building entire markets. Lumen is taking a different path forward than the other big telcos.
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