Lumen retains its dominant position in the optical wavelength services market
Lumen’s ongoing fiber build and move to reestablish its focus solely on business and wholesale services has solidified its status as a key provider of wavelength services, cementing a top position on Vertical Systems Group’s 2025 U.S. Wavelength LEADERBOARD.
As it continues to build out its fiber network, which includes 3,200 new miles of overpull fiber across 27 routes in 2025, the provider continues to find success with selling wavelength services as part of its Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF) platform.
In the fourth quarter, Lumen won another $2.5 billion in new Private Connectivity Fabric (PCF) agreements.
Joining Lumen on the top wavelength ranking are Zayo, Verizon, AT&T and Crown Castle.
Zayo, which has taken the second position on the 2025 U.S. Wavelength LEADERBOARD, will enhance its wavelength capabilities when it completes its acquisition of Crown Castle’s Fiber Solutions business later this year.
Coming right behind Zayo is Verizon, which ranks third for U.S. Wavelength services. Like Zayo, Verizon has the potential to enhance its wavelength capabilities following its acquisition of Frontier Communications in January. The service provider struck a deal with AWS in November to build new, long-haul, high-capacity fiber pathways to connect AWS data center locations.
Notably, three of the 2025 U.S. Wavelength Services LEADERBOARD companies – Lumen, Verizon, and AT&T – are also ranked on the 2025 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD. Also, all five companies ranked on the 2025 U.S. Wavelength Services LEADERBOARD are major suppliers of lit fiber connectivity to commercial buildings and Data Centers.
Overall, the growth of wavelength services varied in 2025. “The U.S. wavelength marketplace diverged sharply in 2025, with several vendors posting double-digit circuit growth while others remained flat or had declines,” said Rick Malone, principal of Vertical Systems Group. “These shifts yielded an installed base that grew seven percent overall.”
400/800G demand rising
Within the wavelength services market, 400G and, increasingly, 800G wavelength services continue to see growing demand.
VSG noted that wavelength providers cite that U.S. customer demand for 400 Gbps services escalated significantly in 2025.
Lumen, for one, is making three major network upgrades: building 400G rapid route wavelength services across 36 routes, with others in development; enabling 400G services for data centers across key markets; and a metro expansion plan to connect the most desired routes, data centers, and cities. Given its increased focus on serving business customers, Lumen’s Wavelength Solutions have 125 cloud on-ramps, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and IBM.
On the 800G front, the demand is being driven by a host of hyperscalers, neocloud providers, AI and GenAI companies, data centers and large enterprises.
Top challenges for implementing gigabit Wavelength services include fiber capacity upgrades and installations, lengthy equipment and space acquisitions, network operations issues, and sufficient power supplies.
“All major wavelength providers are now offering 400 Gbps waves across their footprints and are actively ramping 800 Gbps installations,” Malone said.
Emerging challengers
Outside the top providers, there’s a strong group of emerging providers that continue to enhance their wavelength service offerings.
Arelion, Brightspeed, Cogent, Frontier, and Uniti (formerly Windstream) all attained a 2025 Challenge Tier citation for U.S. Wavelength services.
VSG’s Challenge Tier cites providers with between 1% and 4% share of the 2025 U.S. Wavelength Services market.
In 2025, the Challenge Tier ranking changed slightly as Cogent, Frontier and Uniti all moved up from the Market Player tier to the Challenge Tier.
Cogent, for one, continued to make progress in growing its wavelength business in 2025. During the fourth quarter, the service provider reported that wavelength revenue rose 18.8% sequentially from Q3 2025 to $12.1 million. Likewise, wavelength customer connections increased by 17.9%, sequentially from the third quarter of 2025.
Cogent said as of the end of 2025, it was “offering wavelength services in 1,068 locations, all capable of 10 gigabit, 100 gigabit and 400 gigabit services with provisioning intervals of approximately 30 days.”
Likewise, Uniti reported that its Fiber Infrastructure contributed $210.5 million in revenue and $103.4 million in contribution margin for the fourth quarter of 2025.
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Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.