Lumen Technologies, Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

It's great to be here.

Yeah. The future for us is very clear, and that is a complete digitizing of the networking experience. When you think about our portfolio today, we've already got a significant growth company inside of Lumen that's over half of our revenue. Last quarter, it grew 14%. We separately have a legacy stream of revenue, and that's sole purpose is to generate cash while we pivot this transformation. That's something that we'll continue to do on that side. As we go forward, Alkira, combined with what Lumen's footprint is today and our ability to provide direct cloud access.

When you combine that direct cloud access and our NaaS capabilities to get you from premise to the cloud, we now have what we would refer to as an east-west capability, which is really the ability, in a very network and cloud agnostic way, move data from anywhere to anywhere on demand. As enterprise moves to inference, the network is the bottleneck. It is not energy, it is not GPUs, it is the network. We have just created the unlock to make all of that work in a much more efficient way, but also a lower cost of ownership way. We think it is the right solution at the right time, and that is the focus.

Sure. The historical base of strategic revenue is really connectivity solutions. You are going to have fiber waves, IP, security will be in there as well. That is the bulk of what is in there. What we are really seeing in terms of growth today is significant growth in on-demand waves, which is not a surprise. When we talk about PCF and those big pipes, those are really of interest to a very few customers. The capacity is enormous. It is largely hyperscale focused. Even with existing conduit and existing routes where we can deploy relatively quickly, it is still years until that capacity is fully online. When you get into other customers that are big customers, big users, neoclouds as an example, Wavelengths is really the solution because it is ready and it is ready now. We have invested significantly in the network and our ability to provide 400G Wavelengths on demand.

We had revenue grow, I think it was 11% last quarter, but sales actually grew 35%. Connectivity is still the underlying piece that is driving Great the strategic revenue.

Yeah. If we think about what has happened in the connectivity environment over the last few years, there was this burst at the beginning, which was really PCF driven, which was hyperscale demand for training of their LLMs. It was for internal consumption. They need massive pipes to deal with the training aspect of AI. As we move into inference, the next largest customers who are part of that ecosystem is the neoclouds. Immediately on the heels of that is enterprise. That is where you start to move into the Wavelengths environment because it gives you that connectivity that you need right now. Our ability to sell that is bolstered by the fact that our Wavelengths product today on a NaaS circuit is digitally available.

You can self-provision, and you can be up and running in a very short period of time rather than waiting for trucks to drive around. It is the combination of what we have today as a capability and what is being deployed through Network-as-a-Service that makes this a very compelling offer for enterprise and the neoclouds.