Lumen launches Intelligent Internet service for scalable enterprise connectivity. Lumen Technologies has launched Lumen Intelligent Internet, a connectivity service designed to help enterprises move data at the speed required by artificial intelligence worklo... By AI Engineering Team Lumen Technologies has launched Lumen Intelligent Internet, a connectivity service designed to help enterprises move data at the speed required by artificial intelligence workloads. The offering provides a digital, programmable experience that allows customers to adjust network capacity as their requirements change during AI development and deployment. Customers can provision and modify connectivity through application programming interfaces (APIs) or the Lumen Connect service. They can also scale bandwidth according to business needs and select term-based pricing for a predictable monthly rate. The service includes enterprise control and security options such as DDoS Essentials and Lumen Defender. Beta customers included iVision, SABIS, Skyway Studios, and the New York Yankees. Lumen Intelligent Internet is now generally available to enterprise customers across more than 10 million US business locations, with bandwidth scalable to as much as 100 Gbps. Lumen described the service as an alternative to the fixed-capacity model traditionally associated with enterprise internet. The company said that AI adoption and increasing data movement are placing additional pressure on enterprise networks. Lumen cited IDC research indicating that almost 40 percent of enterprises experienced bandwidth requirements growing by more than 50 percent year over year. The research also found that 29 percent of enterprises faced challenges adapting their network infrastructure to support AI workloads. "Businesses can easily scale compute and storage up or down as their needs change. Enterprise internet should work the same way," said Jim Fowler, Lumen chief technology and product officer. "AI is making demand harder to predict, not easier. Lumen Intelligent Internet gives businesses the ability to respond in real time instead of paying today for capacity they might need tomorrow. We're redesigning internet service for enterprises with a new model that gives customers greater control over connectivity, capacity, and cost as their businesses change."

Citi: Lumen targets 58M fiber miles. Lumen Technologies plans to expand to 58 million fiber miles by 2031 as CEO Kate Johnson says future growth no longer depends on additional hyperscaler Private Connectivity Fabric contracts. Lumen Technologies expects its network footprint to reach 58 million fiber miles by the end of 2031, nearly five times the 12 million fiber miles in place when CEO Kate Johnson joined the company in 2022, as Lumen expands the physical foundation for its enterprise networking and AI strategy. Speaking at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference, Johnson said the expanded footprint will support hyperscalers but that Lumen has reserved a substantial portion of the network for enterprise demand. The physical expansion is being paired with a programmable network and orchestration layer designed to move data among enterprise locations, data centers, clouds and edge environments on demand. The more significant shift may be how Lumen expects to monetize that infrastructure. Johnson said Lumen has no additional Private Connectivity Fabric, or PCF, business included in its long-range plan after securing roughly $13 billion in contract value from hyperscalers. Those agreements supplied capital that helped Lumen recapitalize and restructure its balance sheet, but Johnson said the company no longer needs additional PCF transactions to finance growth. Future PCF projects will therefore have to meet Lumen's return requirements, with the company favoring opportunities such as adding fiber within existing conduit rather than undertaking entirely new builds. Lumen is instead emphasizing higher-margin digital services delivered across both its own infrastructure and third-party networks. That model extends Lumen's addressable footprint beyond the fiber it owns. Johnson cited a large financial institution that standardized on Lumen Fabric while using AT&T fiber underneath, illustrating how Lumen's orchestration layer can operate independently of the access provider. The company is also targeting its installed base of more than $1 billion in DIA revenue and more than 100,000 customer ports. Lumen can make eligible ports digitally discoverable and convert them into Lumen Fabric ports, allowing customers to change bandwidth, security and services remotely. Johnson said incremental services delivered over existing connections can carry approximately 80% margins. Lumen reported strategic revenue representing 53% of business revenue in its latest quarter, up 14% year over year, as it works toward positive business-segment revenue growth in 2028. | Lumen's AI Networking Strategy - Key Metrics | | Fiber footprint | 12M fiber miles to a targeted 58M by year-end 2031 | | PCF contracts | ~$13B contract value; no additional PCF business assumed in long-range plan | | Strategic revenue | 53% of business revenue, growing 14% YoY | | Installed DIA base | More than $1B in revenue and 100,000+ deployed ports | | Digital upsell economics | Approximately 80% margins for incremental services over existing connectivity | "You cannot support AI without a programmable network," Johnson said, describing Lumen's shift from selling fixed physical circuits toward on-demand connectivity, orchestration and network services managed through a common digital platform. Analysis. The 58 million fiber-mile target is significant, but Johnson's comments about PCF reveal the more important change in Lumen's strategy. The initial wave of hyperscaler Private Connectivity Fabric agreements provided approximately $13 billion in contract value at a time when Lumen needed capital to restructure its finances and expand its infrastructure. Management is now explicitly separating the next stage of growth from the need to continually secure additional large PCF contracts. That puts greater emphasis on monetizing infrastructure already deployed. Lumen's DIA installed base provides an example. Turning eligible existing ports into programmable Lumen Fabric endpoints potentially changes a static Internet access connection into a platform capable of supporting multiple services, including bandwidth-on-demand, DDoS protection, Lumen Defender and Multi-Cloud Gateway. Because the underlying customer connection is already installed, the economics of adding software-controlled services can be substantially different from constructing new physical routes. The carrier-agnostic element is equally important. Lumen's acquisition of Alkira added cloud-native orchestration that can operate across heterogeneous carrier and cloud infrastructure. Lumen therefore does not necessarily have to own every access fiber to control the service delivered across it. That architecture was reinforced in August when Lumen expanded Multi-Cloud Gateway beyond its own fiber footprint to more than 10 million U.S. business locations through qualified third-party connections. For AI infrastructure, this positions Lumen primarily in the Scale Across layer: connecting distributed data centers, clouds, enterprise locations and other endpoints rather than providing the Scale Up or Scale Out fabrics inside individual AI clusters. The physical network remains critical - hence the expansion toward 58 million fiber miles - but the business model increasingly depends on the software and orchestration layer turning that physical capacity into programmable infrastructure. Help others discover this reporting. Editorial responsibility Jim Carroll. Editor & Publisher Every article published by Converge Digest is researched, curated, fact-checked and editorially reviewed by Jim Carroll, Editor & Publisher. AI-assisted drafting may be used to accelerate production, but all content is reviewed, refined and approved prior to publication. From the Frontier You just read about Lumen Technologies. They held this record once. 1.2 Tbps over 3,050 km Lumen Technologies; Ciena · March 2025 · 3.66 Pb·km/s A single-carrier 1.2 Tbps wavelength across 3,050 km (1,895 miles) without regeneration. B·L = 3.66 Pbps·km. Field Trial On this day. September 9 From 25 years of the Converge Digest archive.

Outdoor Holding Company names Greg Arnold Vice President of Software Development. Veteran engineering leader to advance platform modernization and the disciplined, AI-enabled evolution of GunBroker's software development organization Atlanta, Ga., Sept. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Outdoor Holding Company, parent of GunBroker.com, the largest online marketplace dedicated to firearms, hunting, shooting, and related products, today announced the appointment of Greg Arnold as Vice President of Software Development. Arnold will lead GunBroker's software engineering organization, with responsibility for platform modernization, product development and the ongoing scalability, security and reliability of the GunBroker.com marketplace. Reporting directly to Outdoor Holding Company Chairman and CEO Steve Urvan, Arnold will set the technical direction for the GunBroker platform and lead the engineering organization through its next stage of evolution. He will change not just what the team builds, but how it builds. That work spans the full software development lifecycle: continuing to modernize the platform, shortening the path from idea to production, and deepening the observability and operational rigor that keep a high-volume marketplace fast and dependable, with delivery speed, quality and reliability tracked against engineering health metrics. Arnold will also lead the disciplined adoption of AI within the engineering organization, applied across the development lifecycle under clear standards for security, intellectual property protection, code quality and responsible use. The appointment supports the execution priorities the Company outlined with its first quarter fiscal 2027 results: growing marketplace activity and market share, expanding transaction monetization through value-added services, protecting the Company's reset cost structure through disciplined hiring and return-based investment, and deploying AI where it can produce measurable improvements in listing quality, customer-service efficiency, transaction friction and conversion. "Technology is central to how we continue to evolve GunBroker and serve our buyers and sellers," said Steve Urvan, Chairman and CEO of Outdoor Holding Company. "Our operating philosophy is simple: Continuous Improvement. Disciplined Growth. Greg embodies both. He has led large engineering organizations through complex platform transformations while staying close to the technology itself, and over the past year he has been hands-on building and operating production software with AI. His experience with high-availability transactional platforms, engineering discipline and the practical, governed use of AI maps directly to where we are taking GunBroker: a faster, more reliable platform that expands monetization through value-added services and deploys AI where it produces measurable improvements for our buyers and sellers." Arnold brings more than 26 years of technology and engineering experience from Lumen Technologies, where he most recently led a 140-person distributed organization spanning software engineering, site reliability and production operations for Lumen's Network as a Service platform. At Lumen, he modernized enterprise ordering and provisioning systems, launched an external API marketplace supporting more than two billion API calls per month, and built the company's data science organization from the ground up. Since then, Arnold has worked hands-on developing and operating production software built with AI agents, establishing governance, evaluation and human-review practices for their responsible use. "GunBroker has built an extraordinary marketplace and technology platform over more than two decades," said Arnold. "The opportunity now is to pair that foundation with a modern engineering operating model that balances innovation with reliability. That means continuing to modernize the platform, strengthening how we plan, build, test, release and operate software, and applying AI across the development lifecycle with the evaluation, governance and human review it requires. Done with discipline, that evolution makes us faster, more reliable and better able to serve our buyers and sellers." Arnold holds a B.S. in Information Technology from Purdue University Global and served as a nuclear electronics technician in the United States Navy. About Outdoor Holding Company Outdoor Holding Company is the publicly traded parent and operator of GunBroker.com, the largest online marketplace dedicated to firearms, hunting, shooting and related products. Third-party sellers list items on the site and federal and state laws govern the sale of firearms and other restricted items. Firearms sold through the marketplace are transferred through federally licensed firearms dealers in accordance with applicable law. Launched in 1999, the GunBroker.com website is an informative, secure and safe way to buy and sell firearms, ammunition, shooting accessories and outdoor gear online. GunBroker promotes responsible ownership of guns and firearms. GunBroker.com is operated by Outdoors Online, LLC, a subsidiary of Outdoor Holding Company (Nasdaq: POWW, POWWP). For more information, visit: www.gunbroker.com. Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the Company's platform modernization, technology and AI initiatives and their anticipated benefits. Forward-looking statements are based only on management's current beliefs, expectations and assumptions and are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict, many of which are outside of the Company's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Investors should review the risks and uncertainties described under the caption "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2026 and additional disclosures the Company makes in its other filings with the SEC, which are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and except as required by law, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein. For investors: Darrow Associates Phone: (917) 886-9071 [email protected] Company Profile Outdoor Holding Company Industry: Defense Website: https://outdoorholding.com/overview/default.aspx Recommended reading.