- Cloud on-ramps have traditionally been a bottleneck
- So, Lumen and AWS collaborated to create a new offering, AWS Interconnect – Last Mile
- It takes the Lumen network all the way into the AWS cloud
AWS and Lumen Technologies say their joint initiative, AWS Interconnect - Last Mile, is now commercially available. The offering combines AWS cloud with Lumen’s extensive network footprint to redefine how businesses connect to the cloud, according to an AWS/Lumen blog.
The new offering was first introduced at AWS’s re:Invent conference in December 2025, where AWS VP of Network Services Robert Kennedy said it was undergoing testing. The cloud provider created the product along with Lumen to allow customers to connect their branch offices, data centers and remote locations to AWS with just a few clicks.
Customers can go to the AWS Console and instantly establish private, high-speed connections to AWS by simply choosing their preferred AWS Region, bandwidth speed, Direct Connect Gateway ID and partner subscriber ID. Once initiated, AWS generates an activation key to complete provisioning with Lumen.
Scott Yow, SVP of Product with Lumen Technologies, told Fierce: “What we're doing with Interconnect - Last Mile is a fundamentally new way to connect into the cloud. One is: it's Layer Three, and because of that, the customer doesn't have to sort of manage the complexity of dealing with redundancy and dealing with multiple PoP scenarios because we basically do that for them.”
Yow said Lumen and AWS co-engineered the solution where there are two sites, with two routers per site, and super high capacity that’s pre-provisioned. The sites are linked together at the API level so that connections can be turned on near instantaneously.
He said traditionally, there was the enterprise network and the cloud network, and the connectivity between them had to be engineered through various data center sites. “With this, we're actually taking the Lumen network all the way in and making it part of the cloud. It's not like two different demarcation points anymore.”
API-driven and automatic
A lot of the cloud on-ramps are super congested, and AWS Interconnect – Last Mile solves that problem, according to Yow. It's the first time that enterprises can provision high-performance, scalable connectivity to AWS as easily as a spinning up compute and storage. It's all API-driven and automatic.
The motivation to create this new type of connectivity was really driven by AI because if its latency requirements aren’t met, a lot of applications won’t even work. They’ll simply break.
“This is what really created this need for us to build these next generation digital on-ramps,” said Yow. “We can now turn all of this up dynamically and on demand, and that is what is net-new.”
Networking steps up
Yow was particularly enthused about the new offering because networking is finally becoming as important as compute and storage. The IT stack has always been composed of compute, storage and networking. But the network has been the red-headed stepchild, compared to the other two. Compute and storage have become very automated and on-demand through cloud, but the networking element has lagged.
Yow said Lumen “is aggressively working to replicate this model as wide as we can across the various different providers. This is not something that we envision as being exclusive just with Amazon.”