Lumen TechnologiesCopied

On 14 September 2020 CenturyLink announced that its enterprise business would become Lumen Technologies. Fierce called it a bold new era as the company split into three brands: Lumen for enterprise, government and global customers; Quantum Fiber for fibre services to homes and small businesses; and CenturyLink for residential and small business customers on traditional networks.

DCD's headline captured the name in a phrase: a unit of luminous flux to help define a company in flux. The lumen is indeed a unit of light, and the name alludes, the company's technology chief told Fierce, to network strength and to the capabilities powered by its platform. Lumen offers a global fibre network, edge cloud, security and collaboration services, with around 450,000 route miles of fibre serving more than 60 countries.

The company tied the change to a new promise, to further human progress through technology, and to the fourth industrial revolution of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and autonomous vehicles. The stock ticker moved from CTL to LUMN on 18 September. Fierce noted that the split grouped the more profitable parts of CenturyLink away from the less profitable residential business, which could make the latter easier to sell, and reported that the company could not say what the rebrand would cost and was in its early stages.

The company's own release, datelined Denver, spelled out the fourth industrial revolution pitch: smart, connected devices everywhere, and a platform to deliver smart cities, retail and industrial robotics, real-time virtual collaboration and automated factories. It is a lot of future to hang on a telecom carrier, but it shows what the new name was for.

CenturyLink had grown out of a regional telco founded in Monroe, Louisiana in 1968, and its network was assembled from Level 3, Qwest and others.

The name does what enterprise names need to do. Lumen is short, global and abstract enough to cover any service, with a quiet reference to the light that carries data down fibre. It is also a classic separation rebrand: a new brand for the business with a future, and the old one left for the parts it may sell.