- Enterprises are struggling to order the correct amount of bandwidth capacity in advance
- Traditional traffic peaks no longer apply
- Lumen Intelligent Internet lets enterprises scale their bandwidth up and down on demand
Lumen Technologies has launched Lumen Intelligent Internet, which lets its enterprise customers buy connectivity in minutes and scale bandwidth up or down as their AI, cloud and business needs demand.
More than ever before, enterprises are struggling to plan for their bandwidth capacity needs because of the change in traffic patterns due to AI. Without on-demand connectivity, they must forecast bandwidth months in advance and provision for peaks that may never happen.
IDC research found that 37% of enterprises have seen their bandwidth needs grow by more than 50% year over year, while 29% have struggled to align their networks with AI workloads.
“Businesses can easily scale compute and storage up or down as their needs change. Enterprise internet should work the same way,” said Jim Fowler, Lumen’s chief technology and product officer.
Ryan Asdourian, Lumen’s chief marketing and strategy officer, told Fierce the next users enterprises must plan for are not people. "We're seeing more machine-to-machine traffic than ever before," he said. "And that is a predictability thing that Intelligent Internet allows you to plan for in a different way, because agents don't sleep, they don't wait. And so, every enterprise is having to learn how to solve for what is happening even when humans aren't sitting at their desks.”
Lumen has been working on dynamic delivery of connectivity in three areas:
- Its Alkira integration, which includes cloud connection points;
- Lumen’s multi-cloud gateway, which brings multi-cloud connections into one view; and
- Network as a Service (NaaS).
Lumen Intelligent Internet is part of NaaS, which includes traditional connectivity services such as enterprise Ethernet and VPN.
Intelligent Internet is an expansion of Lumen’s Internet-on-Demand but with advanced features such as digital control of elastic capacity with predictable economics. “It's bringing one unified experience to not only buy it, but to give you control around it, and to have a programmable experience of all of the features that are in the connectivity stack,” said Asdourian.
There are already some customers using Intelligent Internet, including iVision, Skyway Studios and the New York Yankees. For the Yankees, Intelligent Internet allows them to scale up to peak capacity for game days, then dramatically reduce bandwidth when the stadium is closed.
Lumen Intelligent Internet is available now to enterprise customers at more than 10 million U.S. business locations, with bandwidth scalable up to 100 Gbps. The service combines digital control with Lumen’s global network.
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