Lumen Technologies released a status report on infrastructure buildouts in 2025, claiming milestones on its mission to build 47 million urban textile miles.
Overall, Lumen said construction was ongoing from coast to coast, bringing “major” advancements to its mission to build the backbone of the artificial intelligence (AI) economy. It added that it plans to add 34 million urban textile miles by the end of 2028 as part of its 47 million urban textile miles target, adding that it is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar build. The company said it already offers network capacity upgrades and enhanced high speed connectivity in 2025, creating the network infrastructure that companies need to enhance their AI workloads.
“This is not staged. We have Lumen as a reliable network of AI, ensuring the network scale, speed and reliability that our customers can confidently innovate and grow without restrictions.”
Emphasizing certain milestones, the company said it would defeat more than 2.2 million new intercity fiber miles (over 2,500 route miles) in terms of the new fibers rolled out by the end of August 2025. This is expected to reach total intercity textile miles by the end of the year. Lumen pointed out that Corning's next-generation fiber optic cables are used to fit twice as many fibers into existing conduits.
Signal booster construction efforts are currently underway at 176 inline amplifiers (ILA) sites. Lumen observed that the ILA shelters built at these sites were designed to act as huge signal boosters along the network, tripling the power density compared to traditional ILA shelters, and being updated, updated and expanded for the future.
The company has also expanded conduit access and completed unavailable usage rights across 55 additional routes.
From a network capacity perspective, Lumen said by August 2025 it is preparing to add 5.9+ PBPS total capacity to its network so far this year, providing the bandwidth needed to handle the massive amount of data processing. It also extended faster speeds and expanded by over $100 million to create what the company believes is a high-performance pipeline needed for AI workloads. The Lumen 400G-enabled network spans over 100,000 route miles.
Lumen said it operates North America's largest ultra-low intercity fiber network, using fibers with 25% less optical loss than its competitors, with diverse routes connecting more than 50 major cities. This is calculated by reducing the translated losses at less frequent optical fiber signal regeneration, reducing equipment costs by a 25% figure based on comparison with vintage 2,000 fibers (down from a loss of .22 dB/km to 17 dB/km).
Additionally, networks have 60% more capacity than traditional designs, allowing data to move more efficiently and at a larger scale. The lumen network also provides latency of less than 5ms at the edge, covering up to 97% of US business demand.
Another important facet highlighted in the status report was an update on the Lumen Private Connection Fabric. Designed for AI workloads, its purpose is to help businesses integrate services and increase efficiency with self-service portals and full lifecycle automation. This allows you to purchase, deploy and remotely manage consumption-based services using the speed and agility required by multi-cloud AI First World.
“A mile of new fiber and capacity upgrades add strength to the private connection fabric,” Prigg said. “Lumen not only expands its infrastructure, it also lays the foundation for the AI economy.”
