Lumen Technologies to ‘relentlessly pursue’ a digital future, says CEO

“When NaaS was a bit nascent, we had to kind of do it as a hobby, and now that it’s becoming core and showing a very promising adoption curve — which will translate into a very promising revenue growth curve — we’ve got to dedicate more resource to it,” said Lumen President and CEO Kate Johnson.

Lumen Technologies, formerly CenturyLink, is making progress on its goal to return the company to revenue growth via its strategic enterprise services, including network-as-a-service (NaaS) and the Lumen Connected Ecosystem, according to Lumen President and CEO Kate Johnson.

On its Q3 2025 earnings call Thursday Lumen shared some of its recent wins, including reaching more than $10 billion in private connectivity fabric deals signed to date and more than 1,500 customers adopting Lumen NaaS since its launch with well-known brands such as GE Vernova, Best Buy, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Lumen is going to “relentlessly pursue” its digital future, which will mean “demoting” analog offerings in favor of allocating more resources to growth areas, Johnson said.

“When NaaS was a bit nascent, we had to kind of do it as a hobby, and now that it’s becoming core and showing a very promising adoption curve — which will translate into a very promising revenue growth curve — we’ve got to dedicate more resource to it … For any company in transformation, you have to be ambidextrous. You have to take care of the old and you have to build new at the same time,” she said.

Based on the company’s current build schedule and the existing $10 billion in-hand for private connectivity fabric deals so far, Lumen expects to yield a recurring revenue stream of $400 million to $500 million by the time the company exits 2028.

“Traditional network architectures, they were built for simpler times, and they just won’t cut it anymore. They’re not big enough or fast enough or intelligent enough or secure enough. Simply put, traditional networks let precious GPU investments sit idle, and Lumen is changing all of that,” Johnson said.

Lumen in Q1 2025 introduced Lumen Connectivity Fabric, a set of network services that can be remotely managed via the cloud. During the next quarter’s earnings call at the end of July, the company introduced the Lumen Connected Ecosystem that customers can use to purchase, provision and manage their network services as easily as they do their cloud solutions, such as NaaS, Johnson said.

These two pieces, said Johnson, offer a meaningful source of revenue growth for the company.

Q3 2025 financial results

Lumen categorizes its portfolio of business services into three segments. The Grow segment, which includes the carrier’s higher-margin offerings, such as SASE, security, cloud, and UC collaboration services, saw growth of 10.5 percent during the quarter. The Grow segment accounted for 50 percent of the company’s total business revenue during the quarter. Chris Stansbury, Lumen’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, predicted that the Grow segment will easily account for more than half of the company’s business by next year.

“While we still carry the weight of declining legacy telecom revenue, our Grow revenue base now comprises 50 percent of North American enterprise revenue, up from 35 and a half percent just three years ago. We’re proud of the significant progress our team has made this quarter, and we believe our investment thesis and strategy are showing tangible results,” Johnson said.

Lumen’s Nurture segment includes VPN Data Networks and Ethernet services and accounted for 24 percent of its business during the quarter but declined 17.8 percent. The Harvest segment, which houses the carrier’s legacy services, including voice, represented 15 percent of Lumen’s Q2 2025 business revenues and declined 11.8 percent.

Lumen’s Large Enterprise segment dipped 1.2 percent to $752 million during Q3 compared with revenues of $761 million a year ago. The midmarket enterprise segment declined 10 percent to $488 million in the first quarter compared to $542 million in Q3 2024. North American Enterprise Channels dipped a modest .9 percent to $1.72 billion from $1.73 billion a year prior. Overall, Lumen’s total Business segment revenue dipped 3.2 percent, totaling $2.46 billion in the third quarter compared to $2.54 billion a year ago.

Public sector revenue, on the other hand, increased 11.2 percent year over year to $478 million compared to $430 million in Q3 2024.

Monroe, Louisiana-based Lumen has largely shifted its operations in recent years towards business services. The company in May revealed its plan to offload its 11-state Mass Markets fiber internet business for $5.75 billion in cash to AT&T in a deal set to close in the first half of 2026. via the terms of the deal, AT&T will get about 95 percent of Lumen’s Quantum Fiber, about 4 million fiber locations and about 1 million subscribers. Lumen will keep enterprise fiber customers and mass market copper-based customers, the companies said. The transaction is still subject to certain regulatory and other customary closing conditions.

For the third quarter of 2025 that ended September 30, Lumen surpassed Wall Street’s expectations of revenues of $3.04 billion with reported total revenue of $3.09 billion, which represented a decline of 4.2 percent compared to $3.22 billion in the year-ago period. The company reported a net loss of $621 million for its most recent quarter compared to a net loss of $148 million for the same period a year prior.