- It’s been decades since Lumen built a new long-haul fiber route
- But AI is driving the company to rethink its backbone architecture
- The new route will add about 2,000 miles to Lumen’s network
Lumen Technologies is building a new long-haul fiber route in the U.S. — from Seattle to Minneapolis — the first such major route it’s built in decades.
The new NorthLine fiber deployment will add about 2,000 route miles and integrate with the rest of Lumen’s U.S. network.
The route will support 100G and 400G wavelength services, while creating a clear path to future 800G and 1.6 terabit wavelengths as demand grows.
Lumen is not divulging whether this new route has an anchor tenant. But Microsoft, a major Lumen customer, is based in Seattle, so perhaps that had something to do with the decision to build the route. Lumen also works with AWS, which is based in Seattle.
Lumen currently has 340,000 global route miles of fiber, including one of the largest intercity fiber networks in North America.
Shannon Griffith, SVP of Network Planning at Lumen Technologies, told Fierce that the NorthLine route is being built alongside emerging data center corridors in the northern U.S., where new power capacity is enabling AI infrastructure growth. The line is expected to be available by the end of 2026.
He said AI has caused a lot more demand in the U.S. for East-West routes. In the world of long-haul transport “East-West” refers to traffic between clouds, while “North-South” refers to traffic moving from enterprises into the cloud or internet core.
From Lumen’s map showing the NorthLine route, it does look like the company could use a long-haul transport network from Seattle to Minneapolis. Griffith acknowledged that there are other long-haul competitors in the area, but he said it’s not “very overbuilt.”
Recently, Zayo announced a major new long-haul build, and the company said it’s signed an anchor tenant to help fund the project.
While Lumen refused to say whether it has an anchor tenant for the NorthLine route, when asked if it is funding the route with all of its own capital, Griffith said, “No, we're working with a partner on this.” But he added, “This is less about an anchor tenant and more about [how] Lumen shows up with its growth architecture and can serve many enterprises.”
What goes around comes around
Lumen's roots date back to Level 3, a Denver-based internet backbone provider in the late 1990s. Later, CenturyLink purchased Level 3 and Qwest Communications. CenturyLink rebranded in 2020 as “Lumen Technologies.” Lumen has divested much of its legacy telecom assets and seems to be refocusing on its backbone network.
Griffith said that 25 years ago, “there was a race on demand” for long-haul networks. In the intervening years, Lumen “organically pulled together a very substantial USA fabric,” but the need to build long-haul infrastructure has been “spotty,” because of overbuild during internet boom, he said.
Now, with the advent of AI, it’s a great time for Lumen to reexamine its footprint. “What does the United States need, really, from an architecture perspective?” Griffith said. “There's definitely an opportunity to look at additional corridors or areas where compute is going to have needs to transmit with resiliency and latency improvements.”
Fierce asked if the Northern states where its new route is being built are seeing data-center growth. Griffith said data centers are being built in these states. “The key ingredients for data centers really are land, power and network.” He said there is available land and power, and Lumen wants to provide the networking.
“The reality is, AI is changing where data moves, and the network has to evolve with it," Griffith said.
Lumen RapidRoutes
Services on Lumen’s NorthLine route will be provisioned through Lumen RapidRoutes, which can get a customer up and running with transport capacity in about 20 days. “We hit key locations in the United States where we have capacity ready to go for our customers, and this will be a part of that portfolio,” said Griffith.