5ms latency promised for 70% of customers in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Lumen Technologies has announced the launch of its enterprise edge computing solutions in Europe. The company claims 5 millisecond (ms) latency for 70% of enterprise demand in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Lumen said it has plans to expand to additional locations by the end of 2022.
Lumen’s edge computing solutions are built on the backbone of the company’s global fiber network, which it touts as one of the most-connected and deeply peered networks in the world. Lumen says it operates about half a million miles of fiber, providing services to more than 190,000 building locations and connecting 2,200 public and private third-party data centers. About 42,000 miles of that connects Lumen’s network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA). There, it connects to more than 2,500 on-net buildings and 540 data centers.
To build out the European deployment, the company activated an additional 100G multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and IP network connectivity. Lumen also boosted power and cooling at key edge data center locations in Europe, it said. Lumen’s edge computing services include Bare Metal, a pay-as-you-go dedicated hardware hosting service designed for single-tenant systems and protected data environments; Network Storage, which promises fast, scalable, and secure network storage for both enterprises and public sector organizations; Private Cloud, which provides pre-built infrastructure suited for high-performance private cloud computing applications; and Gateway, Lumen’s Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) platform intended for on-premises use.
Lumen is the former CenturyLink. The company rebranded and repositioned itself in 2020 as a global platform to accelerate Industry 4.0 innovation. At the time of the 2020 rebranding, president and CEO Jeff Storey loftily proclaimed his rebranded business’s intention no less than “to further human progress through technology.”
The company sold off some of its CenturyLink ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange) assets to Apollo across 20 states for $7.5 billion in a deal announced a few months after the rebranding. Lumen retained assets in 16 states, along with 687,000 fiber subscribers; Apollo added 59,000 subscribers and assets throughout the U.S. Midwest and South.
T-Mobile U.S. made a deal with Lumen in 2021 to use Lumen’s edge infrastructure to help “enterprises effectively build, manage and scale applications across highly distributed environments.” Customers would be able to access “hundreds of thousands of on-net enterprise locations on the Lumen fiber network” using T-Mobile’s 5G network. Also part of the deal, T-Mobile became “a preferred wireless connectivity partner for Lumen.”
