Dive Brief:
- Lumen Technologies did not set an end-of-life date for its enterprise voice services, which the networking company will no longer sell amid an ongoing push to deliver digital services to large businesses and data centers, executives said in an earnings call for the quarter ended June 30. Total revenue declined 9% year over year to $2.8 billion.
- The vendor’s legacy portfolio, which contains voice and copper-based services, declined 15% in the quarter, while its strategic portfolio of digital and advanced networking products grew 14%.
- “We announced end of sale [for voice],” President and CFO Chris Stansbury told investors.“End of life is a different story; we’re going to be aggressive about that and make the right financial decisions. We will meet the obligations of our big customers, we’ll meet the regulatory obligations we have; beyond that, this is not our future.”
Dive Insight:
Customers, channel partners and rival providers are eager to learn when Lumen plans to sunset its voice services. The company, which has a telco lineage dating back to the 1930s, is pivoting away from voice to cloud and digital services.
“It is the single largest land grab in the history of my career,” said Jim Glackin CRO of Coeo Solutions, which is positioning its own voice platform. “They just put every one of those customers in play.”
The business Lumen is leaving is sizable. Lumen’s harvest and voice and other segments, which include long distance services,time division multiplexing voice and private line, generated $2.7 billion in revenue last year, according to the company’s 2025 annual report.
Stansbury shrugged off the impact on Lumen’s performance, pointing to “very low single digit” revenue for voice in the most recent quarter.
“It’s immaterial,” he said. “It’s not about what’s driving our future. It comes down to the revenue management and there’s very few customers that we actually need to be concerned about when we look at the bulk of that business.”
CEO Kate Johnson said the exit from voice and copper-based services reflect a focus on customers with a wide base of products.
“We have a huge number of customers that have a very small monthly MRR and do not have other services,” Johnson said. “We have a much smaller base of customers numerically that actually have a very large book of business with Lumen.”
Midmarket enterprise revenue, where many of Lumen’s channel partners sell, declined 8% year over year to $435 million. Large enterprise was Lumen’s fastest growing customer segment, ticking up 4% to $794 million.
Johnson expects enterprises to use the Lumen Connect digital platform for network configuration and buy new services without requiring the company to install physical infrastructure. The result would be an upsell machine.
The company is currently making its dedicated internet access ports discoverable and serviceable in the digital platform. Johnson said the dedicated internet access install base can be parlayed into higher margin digital service sales, including DDoS and Multi-Cloud Gateway routing.
“This is a huge strategic unlock,” Johnson said. “I cannot stress this enough.”
For its remaining voice customers, Lumen will lean on an ecosystem play. Johnson said the company is developing partnerships with voice providers. She did not name the companies, and a Lumen spokesperson told Channel Dive an email that it does not have specific information at this time.
JS Group CEO Janet Schijns expects a mix of options, including Microsoft Teams with calling plans, cloud-based unified communications platforms and even Google-specific vendors.
However, the “egregious” part of Lumen’s plan was not involving partners to those migration roadmaps, Schijns said.
“Identify who your voice providers are that you're going to move it to, what your migration plans are, what the offer looks like to the customer and incent your channel to go do the work for you,” Schijns said. “All they incented the channel to do is move them to somebody that's not Lumen.”
