Undeterred by slower-than-expected movement in residential fiber construction, Lumen Technologies is adding another bunch of fiber to its slate. The hope is to add 6 million miles of new fiber to its long-haul infrastructure by 2026.
Lumen's efforts will focus on its backbone network, not metro or residential assets. Its newly announced goal is part of a national upgrade project that Lumen has been working on for the past five years or so, said CTO Andrew Dugan. The idea is to use existing conduit laid by Level 3 Communications, Qwest, Broadwing and WilTel - all now part of Lumen - to replace old fiber with a lot of new ultra-low-loss glass prime filaments from Corning.
The carrier now uses Ciena's 6500 optical platform to deliver 400G services across much of its network. Its infrastructure is now scalable to 800G. But Dugan explained that the upgrade will give Lumen the flexibility to deploy new technologies such as OpenZR+ on private lines.
"Having really low-loss fiber gives you the technical flexibility that you wouldn't have if you had older generation fiber," Dugan said. "If you look at the performance of OpenZR+ on next-generation fiber versus older-generation fiber, you see a significant difference in the distances these optics can travel."
To date, Dugan says Lumen has run about 6 million fiber miles over a 24,000-mile route, which means an average fiber count of about 250. but the CTO notes that its fiber counts range from a minimum of 216 to a maximum of 512, depending on the route. By comparison, its legacy assets use 96 cables.
Lumen hopes to add at least 6 million more miles of fiber to its network, which means the average fiber count is much higher, closer to 500, but Dugan noted that given the expected increase in its route miles, it's difficult to calculate exactly where it will land as it makes new builds.
Dugan said the high fiber count reflects the company's strong demand for dark fiber. While it sees interest in "many verticals," he noted, "network extenders will be big consumers of dark fiber like this." Dugan declined to comment on whether Lumen has signed a contract, but added that it is "very confident in the demand behind these buildings."
