Another Lumen Reinvention?

Lumen has been the hardest large big telecommunications company to figure out. Verizon, AT&T, Frontier, Windstream, and others have clearly decided that building fiber is the future path to survival. Consequently, the other companies are far ahead of Lumen in terms of fiber passings. CEO Kate Johnson talked about Lumen’s upcoming fiber plans. In doing so, she mentioned that Lumen only covers 12% of its passings with fiber – far behind the other companies. In 2022, the company announced that its major expansion thrust was to beef up its large intercity fiber network across the country, with the goal of adding over 6 million miles of fiber strand by 2026. The original CenturyLink fiber network was starting to show some age, with many routes built forty years earlier. The company planned to upgrade to the newest fiber from Corning that can support 400-gigabit electronics. Lumen is going to reinvest money into building new fiber passings and has plans to connect 500,000 homes and businesses, as well as plans to build deeply into six major metro areas in 2023. The company needs to reinvent itself. Lumen lost 253,000 broadband customers in 2022 – 7.7% of its broadband base. The company lost another 56,000 broadband customers in the first quarter of 2023, dropping the company to fewer than 3 million broadband customers while falling to be the eighth largest broadband provider after being surpassed by T-Mobile.