CenturyLink unveiled a new branding strategy today, effectively breaking itself into two brands. The company introduced Lumen Technologies, or just Lumen, as its new brand for its largest business segment, enterprise and wholesale.
The CenturyLink brand will remain and will represent the company’s legacy residential and small business segments. Although, CenturyLink is also introducing a new brand for that unit, Quantum Fiber, for its growing FTTH network. Confused yet?
“All of our futures will be driven by smart things, applications and digital services that use data for transformational purposes,” said Shaun Andrews, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Lumen in a press release. “To serve this colossal need and further human progress through technology, we have launched Lumen and are delivering our technology through the Lumen Platform, a platform for amazing things.”
Lumen is the new brand and ‘platform’ for what essentially used to be Level 3 (and legacy CenturyLink’s enterprise and wholesale business units pre-Level 3 acquisition). The new brand will house services for enterprise and wholesale customers focused in these four key areas, according to Lumen:
- Adaptive Networking: Lumen provides hybrid network solutions built to quickly respond to customers’ ever-changing data and application needs.
- Edge Cloud & IT Agility: Lumen enhances application experiences by delivering low-latency, high performance data access and by moving data and workloads closer to where customers need them.
- Connected Security: Lumen offers global threat intelligence, network-based security controls and deep security expertise to help customers protect their data and applications against constantly evolving threats.
- Communications & Collaboration: Lumen’s communication and collaboration solutions make it easy for people to stay connected, productive and engaged wherever they are located.
The company will formally change its corporate name to Lumen Technologies, Inc. upon the satisfaction of legal and regulatory requirements. There isn’t any structural change in leadership, responsibility, or financial strategy according to the company, although it is changing its stock ticker to LUMN from CTL.
Quantum Fiber
CenturyLink and Quantum Fiber will now be the face for residential subscribers. There has been some speculation that CenturyLink is looking to sell its residential and small business unit. This move might add some fuel to that speculation.
CenturyLink’s FTTH footprint is rather small, when compared to its entire residential footprint. It’s not entirely clear what the Quantum Fiber strategy will be. On a FAQ section on the company’s website, an explanation of Quantum Fiber is outlined as the following:
“Quantum Fiber will be coming soon to markets where we offer superior fiber-based internet services. Specific, market-level roll out plans are still in development. Eligible customers will be notified when services become available in their area.”
The website goes on to say Quantum Fiber will eventually be available in all markets where CenturyLink offers fiber-based internet services, but specific market roll out plans are under development.
Does that mean Quantum Fiber is simply the new name for CenturyLink’s FTTH service, or does it mean the company intends to expand Quantum Fiber into new markets? Or both? Hard to tell. I guess we’ll find out, assuming Lumen doesn’t spin off CenturyLink and Quantum Fiber.
