Cisco and Lumen consolidated their joint SD-WAN/LAN service.

Repackaged as Lumen SD-WAN and Managed Equipment with Cisco Meraki, the offering aims to solve network fragmentation issues such as WAN and LAN discrepancy when troubleshooting a network issue across various locations.

The solution comes built on Cisco's cloud-managed Meraki suite and and operated end-to-end across design, deployment, monitoring, and optimization by Lumen in a single environment, touting both WAN and LAN under one solution. Lumen highlighted the suite's minimal operational disruption, efficient deployment, consistent security, and maximum scalability.

Lumen and Cisco's shared history dates to the former's CenturyLink days when it offered customers Cisco Meraki gear as an option for Wi-Fi setups and network switches, before expanding to Meraki’s entire product portfolio including WAN/LAN management and monitoring.

Lumen also offers an SD-WAN service with Cisco Viptela, which leverages Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for complex enterprise WAN orchestration that supports multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) to enable a private WAN between a company’s sites.

Meraki supports WAN/LAN branch management, focusing on standard internet-based connections rather than MPLS.