Lumen today launched a network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering that it is calling “the first important step toward the company’s bold vision to disrupt the telecom industry.” The company is calling the offering “Internet On-Demand.”
According to the company, the offering will give customers “radical flexibility in how they buy, use, and manage networking services.” Lumen said it is “cloudifying” traditional telecom.
Internet On-Demand is the first service Lumen is adding to its NaaS platform, which will eventually include security services, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), and Edge services.
Customers will use a digital portal or APIs to purchase Lumen Internet On-Demand and future services for what the company called “instant” internet connections to public data centers and port-enabled business locations.
According to Lumen, once a connection is established, customers will have access to:
- Internet speeds from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps
- A consumption-based billing model; pay only for the time services are active, starting at hourly rates
- Real-time visibility into service performance and network usage
- Fast enablement of new capabilities
- Quick ability to scale capacity
Lumen Technologies is working with several companies, including data center, cloud, technology, and managed service providers — to maximize reach.
One of the data center operators is Digital Realty. That company is one of the first third-party data center providers to join the Lumen Network-as-a-Service Alliance Partner program. Joint customers can obtain on-demand services using a digital portal or API in real-time and increase or decrease bandwidth as needed.
“We have been preparing for this moment for a long time, building a world-class telecom network with state-of-the-art fiber, broad coverage and unsurpassed route diversity and scalability,” Kate Johnson, Lumen CEO, said, in a prepared statement.
“Lumen’s Network-as-a-Service offering takes the next step to deliver on our customers’ networking dreams: the ability to fire up any port, with any service, at any time.”
