Lumen CEO: Copper Is ‘Worth More To Us Mined Than Operated’

“We’re innovating again … we’re solving increasingly complex problems for our customers and expanding what the Lumen platform can do. We’re executing; the economics are getting better, and we’re innovating for what comes next,” Lumen President and CEO Kate Johnson says.

Lumen Technologies is growing strategic services and deliberately winding down legacy infrastructure, a shift that is making its business more profitable, according to top executives at the telecommunications and enterprise technology firm.

Traffic on Lumen’s global public internet backbone has grown 20 percent since the start of the year, and AI is the fastest-growing slice, Johnson said.

“While AI is still a small percentage of this overall traffic, it has grown more than 1,000 percent since April, an indication that enterprises are really beginning to dig into AI inferencing, and that demand is translating directly into sales growth at Lumen,” she said.

Monroe, La.-based Lumen also said it signed an additional $700 million in Private Connectivity Fabric deals during the quarter, bringing cumulative signed agreements to over $13.5 billion.

On the platform side, the company said more than 4,000 customers are now on its Network as a Service (NaaS) platform. That includes customers using the Lumen Connected Ecosystem, which Lumen introduced last year. It lets customers purchase, provision and manage their network services as easily as they do their cloud solutions, according to the company.

Lumen in July bought cloud networking specialist Alkira for $475 million for its carrier-agnostic software control plane. Combined with Lumen’s physical fiber infrastructure, the tie-up is advancing the company’s NaaS strategy and driving more strategic revenue, Lumen said.

“Great brands like Nasdaq and Volvo continue to choose Lumen, and now with Alkira, they can expand connectivity and control across cloud and data center environments, where AI and digital workloads are driving the fastest growth in network demand,” Johnson said.

The service provider at the same time is focusing its efforts on next-gen networking services by accelerating the decommissioning of its legacy copper network infrastructure in a number of states, including Iowa, Florida, Nevada, and Utah, or approximately 25 percent of its copper footprint.

Lumen’s old playbook was to milk legacy revenue for cash and manage the decline, but with its strategic business growing, it can now free up cash by shutting legacy down, Lumen’s executives said.

“Here’s the spoiler alert: Copper is worth more to us mined than operated,” Johnson said.

Third-Quarter 2026 Results

Lumen’s Strategic revenues, which includes NaaS and other network services such as Alkira, increased 10 percent during the quarter to $1.28 billion, representing 55 percent of the company’s business revenue, while Lumen’s Legacy segment declined 8 percent to $1.07 billion.

“Strategic portfolio margins are meaningfully higher than legacy,” Chris Stansbury, Lumen’s executive vice president and CFO, told investors during the call. “The future of Lumen is being built on strategic growth, not on preserving the past.”

Lumen’s Large Enterprise segment climbed 3.6 percent to $810 million during the third quarter compared with revenue of $782 million a year ago. The midmarket enterprise segment declined 7 percent to $430 million in the third quarter compared with $464 million in third-quarter 2025. North American Enterprise Channels dipped 3 percent to $1.67 billion from $1.72 billion a year prior. Overall, Lumen’s total Business segment revenue dipped 4 percent, totaling $2.35 billion in the third quarter compared with $2.46 billion a year ago.

Lumen earlier this month expanded its partnership with Microsoft to put the Lumen platform into Microsoft’s enterprise selling motion. The two companies will jointly chase deals where AI, cloud and network modernization overlap, Johnson said. Under the co-sell model, Microsoft sellers can retire Azure sales quota when customers adopt Lumen.

Public sector revenue slipped 10 percent year over year to $429 million compared with $476 million in third-quarter 2025.

For the third quarter of 2026 that ended Sept. 30, Lumen fell short of Wall Street’s expectations with reported total revenue of $2.72 billion, which represented a decline of 12 percent compared with $3.09 billion in the year-ago period. The company reported a net loss of $265 million for its most recent quarter compared with a net loss of $621 million for the same period a year prior.

The company’s stock was down 5.89 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $4.47.