Lumen Takes On the Northern Tier

If there’s one part of the continental US that it’s been particularly hard to build out new intercity fiber, it’s what they call the Northern Tier. The lack of population density always made the business case hard to justify.  But in the era of hyperscalers and AI, that route is finally getting attention, and Lumen Technologies is looking to expand across it.

Lumen has unveiled plans to expand its network with a new route between Seattle and Minneapolis that it calls NorthLine. The route crosses North Dakota, montana, and the the Idaho panhandle on the way between Minnesota and Washington. While the map given is not very detailed, it looks as if markets along the way will include Bismarck, Billings, Missoula, and Spokane.  The route looks diverse from what few other maps I have seen across those geographies.

For a long time the only real intercity asset across the northern plains and Rockies was Sprint’s 80s buildout and that had direct-buried fiber. The original Level 3/WilTel/Broadwing/Genuity network builds left this part of the map blank. Qwest/CenturyLink had assets out there as an ILEC but never built out an actual modern longhaul route. TouchAmerica (360Networks and now Zayo) built a route, and XO once spent some effort thinking about building something new up there. Most recently, Ziply unveiled a northern route.

Lumen says that their new route will be ready in Q4 of this year, which is really quick if they were building it all from scratch. And since they aren’t talking about dark fiber and conduit, it seems likely they are piecing together some of those existing assets with new infrastructure builds where needed.  That’s usually the economical way to do such things nowadays. I’d be interested to hear the details though.

Lumen will be deploying nextgen gear in support of 100G and 400G wavelengths with a path to 800G and 1.6T to handle future demand. It’s long past time that we had some real routes across the Northern Tier, and it’s taken the demand of AI to get there.

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