I’ll be honest. Five years ago I would have bet against Lumen. CenturyLink in a new hat. Hemorrhaging enterprise customers. The brand carried more baggage than a holiday airport. The AT&T $250 billion network investment is what the competition is spending to keep pace.
Then Kate Johnson took over, said “we’re rewriting the story of networking,” and backed it up. $8.5 billion in private connectivity contracts in 2024 alone. The Private Connectivity Fabric, fiber with 25% less optical loss and 60% more capacity than competitors, purpose-built for AI workloads. A USDA contract running SD-WAN, zero-trust, edge computing, UC, and contact center across 9,500 federal locations.
That’s not a telco play. That’s an enterprise technology company that happens to own a lot of fiber. For partners, it’s either a massive opportunity or a direct competitor, depending on which side of the deal you’re sitting on. Understanding how channel partners make money in this new landscape is more important than ever. The Lumen-AT&T divestiture makes the enterprise focus even sharper.
I don’t make predictions often, but I’ll make one here: Lumen in 2028 won’t look anything like Lumen in 2024. The Deloitte report on telecoms needing to become platforms captures the same strategic bet Lumen is making. And the partners who figure that out early will do very well.