Lumen, Comcast Business, Zayo and Megaport all went after enterprise access in Q3

As we are in the center of the NaaS revolution, where automated networks are enabling many use cases above and beyond simple connectivity, we want to help spread the word and help operators monetize their assets and sell more services per port.

Lumen, Comcast Business, Zayo and Megaport are all reaching for the same position: the place where an enterprise finds intelligence, buys it, and gets a private path to it. I wrote about that position in Who Owns the On-Ramp to Intelligence? This edition tracks who moved toward it, with the numbers. If you read any of it differently, tell me. It sharpens the next edition.

The plan is to fold Alkira into Lumen Connect over 18 months,⁵ and about 4,000 Lumen people have already been trained on it.^1,2,7 Lumen’s CEO says the deal will “accelerate our strategic revenue growth curve”.⁷

More than one in five first-time NaaS buyers were new to Lumen,⁵ so the product is bringing in customers it didn’t have before.

On 26 August Lumen opened its Multi-Cloud Gateway to more than 10 million US business locations,⁶ far more buildings than its own fiber reaches.

Colt came first, on 11 August. It’s an Innovation Lab program that builds API interoperability on Mplify LSO and uses agentic workflows to discover, order and fulfil connectivity across both carriers, in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.¹⁵ So two carriers have agreed that software can place the order.

The Equinix deal is the bigger one. Since 10 September, Fabric customers can order Comcast Business last-mile Ethernet through LSO-aligned APIs, and the stated goal is to cut delivery “from weeks to days”. Wavelengths, cloud and security are meant to follow, and Comcast Business already connects to 700+ data centers.¹⁶

The standard underneath is already in production,¹⁷ and in September Colt and Lumen took two of Mplify’s awards, for inter-provider automation and for ecosystem collaboration.¹⁹

Zayo launched Agentic Networking on DynamicLink on 8 September and called it “the industry’s first production Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built specifically for networking”. Approved enterprise agents see network state and take authorized actions, and “organizations define the information, tools, and actions available to agents”.^20,21 Max Clauson said it more bluntly at the launch: the future of networking “is not another portal”.²⁰

Equinix took its Fabric MCP server from private beta to public preview at the end of August. Agents can create and update connections there, but deleting one still means going to the portal.^22,23 On 2 September Equinix also announced Fabric One, which takes “agent-based requests or natural-language prompts” to set up any-to-any connectivity. Beta later this year, general availability in 2027.²⁴

The big carriers mostly keep their agents in-house for now. NVIDIA puts telco automation at Level 2 to 3 on TM Forum’s autonomy scale and says getting to Level 4 or 5 takes autonomous agents.²⁹ Lumen, AT&T, Verizon and Colt all run agents internally, and none of them gives customers a public agent interface yet.^30,32,33

A few things didn’t fit the chart. GTT launched Defense Halo on 29 September, network defense running on its own AI factory with data kept in the US, UK or EU.⁴⁰ Mistral is planning up to 1 GW by 2030.⁴¹ The EuroHPC call for AI gigafactories closes on 3 December.⁴²

The utilization numbers are the worrying part. Cast AI found average GPU utilization of 5% across the Kubernetes clusters it analyzed,⁴⁵ and a debt-financed GPU cluster needs something like 70% to break even.⁴⁶ Meanwhile neocloud revenue was about $25B in 2025, Synergy expects the market to approach $400B by 2031,⁴⁷ and ABI Research expects inference to be 80% of neocloud demand by 2030.⁴⁹

Comcast Business grew connectivity revenue 3.7% to US$2.67B.⁵⁰ On the call, CFO Jason Armstrong said Comcast now sells about $0.70 of advanced solutions for every $1 of connectivity, up from $0.20 three years ago.⁵¹ AT&T expects legacy service revenue to drop more than 20% in 2026 and to be “immaterial by the end of 2029”.⁵² And Lumen’s revenue fell 9% in the same quarter its NaaS customers passed 3,000.³

Buyers are moving, slowly. In TeleGeography’s WAN manager survey, 17% have bought NaaS (up from 8% in 2022) and another 25% are researching it, while 19% decided against it. Short NaaS terms still carry a 10% to 35% premium, and Europe’s median 10G port costs US$350 a month, 2.3 times the 1G price.⁵⁵

The consolidation kept going, too. Charter closed Cox on 20 August,¹¹ Verizon and BT agreed a JV for international enterprise wireline,¹⁰ and Vertical Systems’ mid-2026 US Carrier Ethernet ranking moved Verizon to second and brought Zayo in at sixth.⁵⁶

On the floor, people wanted more talent, more resilience and redundancy that actually holds up. Our own takeaway (we posted it on LinkedIn) was that a second circuit doesn’t count as redundancy if it shares a duct, a facility, a power dependency or an operational bottleneck with the first.⁵⁷ Metro Connect ran sessions on whether today’s networks are fit for an inference-led world and whether consolidation is speeding up.⁵⁸ Outside, protesters were objecting to data center water and power use.

Three sessions pitched service providers on becoming the gateway between enterprise AI demand and GPU capacity, and a startup demoed exactly that, providers as the gateway to distributed GPU clusters. PCCW Global presented AI as a service through Console Connect as an “AI Gateway”, and NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS put GPUaaS and NaaS together, with GPUs billed by the minute.⁶⁴

Agents were all over the program. Mplify’s agentic LSO blueprint runs on MCP servers. Amartus, NTT DOCOMO and Colt showed agents troubleshooting together across providers, and another demo had AI agents negotiating deals between carriers.⁶⁴ Federation got its own sessions too, laying out a path to NaaS federation with trusted identity for agents.⁶⁴

From the operators, Comcast Business talked about “the network that provisions itself”, AT&T about “the AI-grade network” and Verizon about automating wholesale partners.⁶⁴

We build the NaaS platform that operators, data centers and GPU providers run under their own brand, over any operator’s network. We don’t sell to enterprises ourselves (our customers keep that relationship and set the price), which is why our name rarely shows up on the product. Zayo’s DynamicLink runs on it in production, and it won a 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Award in August.⁸

Embargoed to 13 OctOn 13 October, at Capacity Europe, we launched the AI Access Platform. GPU, neocloud and data center providers use it to give enterprises private, on-demand access to their capacity, over any operator’s network.