- Lumen wants Wall Street analysts to get over their fixation on its legacy business
- It's working fast to integrate Alkira’s multi-cloud technology
- And it's adding software to its connectivity solutions
The top executives at Lumen Technologies are working hard to reposition the company from its reputation as an operator of legacy voice and broadband services to a company that provides enterprise networking for AI.
On the company’s second quarter 2026 earnings call today, Lumen CEO Kate Johnson said pointedly, “Lumen is becoming a different company. We're helping create a new category: enterprise networking for AI.”
Fierce had the opportunity to chat with Lumen Technologies Chief Financial Officer Chris Stansbury prior to today’s earnings call, where he talked about the company's recent acquisition of multi-cloud networking provider Alkira for $475 million.
Stansbury said Lumen was integrating its own technology into the Alkira platform, rather than the other way around. And Lumen is moving fast on the integration. It’s already trained nearly 4,000 of its employees on the Alkira platform. “What we're doing over the next two quarters is trying to quantify what the impact of Alkira's revenue contributions will be, such that we can commit that to Wall Street,” said Stansbury.
Lumen’s goal is to provide revenue guidance for the full company, for the first time ever, to investors in 2027.
Stansbury said, “The reason I think a lot of this space hasn't given revenue guidance is that it's been in decline, right? It’s been building pipes, and that’s a commodity game.”
But he said Lumen is innovating, and it’s reframing its products as a full networking solution, not just connectivity. Along with its Alkira multi-cloud connectivity and its own long-haul network, Lumen is also offering enterprise customers things that have traditionally been left to software companies such as security products and load balancers.
He bragged that Alkira’s technology gives Lumen the ability to move data “from anywhere to anywhere on demand,” and it is carrier agnostic and cloud agnostic. “There is no one who has the cloud-to-cloud or data center-to-data center connectivity that Alkira has, and there is certainly nobody that has that combined with network as a service and the physical network,” he said.
The company also continues to build out its massive fiber backbone network. During Q2, it announced it was 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.
By the numbers
About 90% of Lumen’s revenue comes from its business customers, while only about 10% comes from its consumer business.
Lumen today stressed that 53% of its total business revenue is now coming from its newer “strategic” business lines, while legacy revenue comprises 47%. In that vein, Lumen is phasing out its enterprise voice business.
Yet, Stansbury predicted that most of the analyst questions on today’s call would be about its legacy business, and he was correct. “Candidly, I'm disappointed with sell-side coverage because they’re thinking like legacy telco,” he said. “They don't believe yet that digital is really going to grow, and they're concerned that legacy is going to go away.”
In terms of current metrics, Lumen today reported revenues of $2.805 billion for the second quarter 2026 with a net loss of $201 million. This compares to revenues of $3.092 billion and a net loss of $915 million in Q2 2025. Although it should be noted that during the past year, Lumen sold its mass markets business to AT&T, so that skews year-over-year comparisons.
The company is still on track with its full year guidance from its Investor Day.
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