AT&T and Lumen Technologies have been ranked among the top U.S. Ethernet carriers by Vertical Systems Group (VSG), with AI and cloud migration flagged as key drivers in the market.

AT&T held onto the number-one position on VSG’s U.S. Carrier Ethernet Leaderboard, which was ranked based on retail port share as of June 30 this year.

In its recent earnings call, AT&T teased an appetite for more fiber to feed growing market opportunities around its wired and wireless broadband services.

Those earnings saw the operator generate revenues of $30.8 billion. Its consumer fiber broadband saw $2.1 billion in revenues, up 18.9% year-over-year, with 243,000 AT&T Fiber net adds in the quarter.

Lumen in second

While Lumen may be selling its consumer fiber business to AT&T for $5.75 billion, the network operator still holds strong in VSG’s view with its enterprise fiber offering.

Coming in behind AT&T on the leaderboard, Lumen generated $3.092 billion in its second quarter.

While this represented a 5.4% drop year-over-year compared to Q2 2024, the company was buoyant about its AI drive, touting nearly 1,000 customers of its network-as-a-service (NaaS) service, which supports both AI and cloud services.

Lumen also reported significant growth in its AI-driven infrastructure business for the quarter. This was especially evident in its Private Capacity Fiber (PCF) segment, with a total of $9 billion in deals, up from $8.5 billion in the previous quarter.

According to VSG’s research, AI is driving requirements for highly secure Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

As covered by SDxCentral, there is a growing demand to bolster inter-data center networking connections to support AI-related data inferencing, with investments rising in optical network connections between large data centers and edge locations.

That demand is driving AT&T’s fiber expansion with its Lumen deal, as well as seeing the operator test 1.6 Tb/s data transport speeds on its fiber network.

Elsewhere on the rankings

Following Lumen on the leaderboard were Spectrum Business, Verizon, Comcast Business, and Cox Business.

Verizon maintained its fourth position in rankings, with the company defiant over its $20 billion acquisition of fiber provider Frontier Communications, in spite of scrutiny from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The SASE aspect

While AI was flagged in the VSG survey, the researchers underlined dedicated internet access (DIA) as the fastest-growing Ethernet service in the U.S., based on both ports and revenue.

Customer migration from switched Ethernet and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services to carrier-managed SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) was also flagged as a key ongoing challenge for the Ethernet market.

That migration concern recently saw AT&T become the first North American service provider to offer Cisco’s SASE platform to its business customers. While that deal happened outside of the survey’s June end-cut off, it will likely maintain AT&T’s leader status going forward, as single-vendor SASE platforms tie together SD-WAN and SSE systems from a single provider. This potentially provides a more uniform and cohesive platform compared to complex multivendor architectures.

“It brings together AT&T's trusted network and the network scale that comes with that, and then Cisco security innovation really to bring together a unified Cisco architecture, or SASE architecture, one that eliminates complexity,” Joe Petrocelli, VP of communications services at AT&T, told SDxCentral regarding the deal.