- Lumen now has more than 2,000 NaaS customers that have bought 7,000 ports, with over 3,800 ports currently active
- NaaS and Lumen’s broader digital platforms are expected to drive digital revenue to $500–$600 million by year‑end 2028
- Lumen shared its revenue forecast for Private Connectivity Fabric and announced Anthropic as a new customer
Lumen’s network-as-a-service (NaaS) growth was a key focus point at the company’s investor event Wednesday, as Lumen just surpassed 2,000 NaaS customers.
CEO Kate Johnson said now that Lumen has reached an inflection point in financial stabilization, it’s striving to deliver “ubiquitous and universal” connectivity to enterprises.
Those 2,000 NaaS customers have bought more than 7,000 ports, with 3,800 already active and running live services, she said. Typically, a customer buys one port then expands, “but we have to help them get to the consumption point,” which Johnson characterized as Lumen’s “land, expand, consume” strategy.
As an example, she referred to one customer – an engineering design firm – that initially trialed a NaaS port for Wide Area Network (WAN) modernization. The company then deployed ports to more sites, all of which had “a mix of bandwidth needs.”
Now, that company has NaaS connectivity across 60 total sites, bringing Lumen a monthly recurring revenue of $46,500. Johnson noted the cost for enterprises depends on the services and bandwidth they plan to consume, but there’s a financial incentive for them to pick Lumen as a one-stop-shop.
“Because they will achieve discounts if they go all in with Lumen,” she said. “This is a common pattern, and we’re excited about the expansion.”
Lumen earlier this month completed the sale of its Mass Markets consumer fiber business to AT&T, which gave the company $4.8 billion in net proceeds to pay off debt and more flexibility to pursue enterprise growth.
The Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF) business is a cornerstone of that growth, as Lumen signed nearly $13 billion in deals to date, which includes agreements with the major hyperscalers and, most recently, Anthropic. Lumen today announced Anthropic selected the company to build out a high-capacity fiber network in North America.
Digital platforms are the new growth driver
While PCF gives Lumen an early revenue boost, CFO Chris Stansbury said it’s the digital side of the business that offers a bigger opportunity in the long run.
Total digital revenue grew 36% year-over-year to $117 million in 2025, he said. Lumen’s digital platforms business encompasses services like NaaS, the company’s new Multi Cloud Gateway, fabric ports as well as security services like SASE.
Lumen is targeting digital revenue to reach $500-600 million by year-end 2028, then $800-$900 million by end of 2030, fueled by increased adoption of ports and services.
“Wherever you have a port and a lot of services on it, you’re going to want redundancy,” Stansbury said, noting it’s a matter of time before customers start to install their inactive ports to turn up services. “So this is moving very rapidly.”
Financial outlook for PCF
PCF revenue is expected to reach $400-500 million by year-end 2028 and $500-600 million by end of 2030. Stansbury further shared an update on PCF cash flow, capex and revenue expectations over the next five years.
He stressed the figures only encompass the deals Lumen has signed thus far. “We have been very consistent in saying we are not going to forecast PCF cash inflows based off a deal we might or might not get, because they are really big, super chunky and hard to predict.”
Roughly 10% of PCF contract value consists of “operating and maintenance,” Stansbury said, and some of those contracts last up to 20 years. “That’ll obviously be a huge piece that flows in after this time, and capex lags those inflows.”
The analysts at BNP Paribas said Lumen’s PCF revenue forecast is helpful for investors to think about the company’s free cash flow (FCF) trajectory. Lumen projected FCF of $1.2 billion-$1.4 billion for 2026, which could consist of roughly $700 million of PCF-related net cash by mid-year, they wrote.