Lumen Technologies is continuing its assault on the AI networking space, unveiling a new way for enterprises to meet their wavelength needs.

Dubbed RapidRoutes, Lumen is offering pre-defined, high-demand network connections ranging from 100G to 400G, in a bid to make network procurement easier. Lumen's new wavelength service aims to significantly reduce provisioning times from months to a 20-day delivery service level agreement (SLA).

“With RapidRoutes, we’re eliminating the friction, no more long quoting periods or engineering delays,” Dave Ward, Lumen's CTO and chief product officer, said. “We’re giving customers a simple promise: get the capacity you need, exactly when you need it.

The move is part of Lumen's broader push to position itself as the go-to network provider for AI workloads. The vendor is making moves to aggressively expand its 400G-enabled footprint to 100,000 wavelength route miles, adding some 1.26 petabytes of new capacity at over 300 locations across 25 metro markets

In August, Lumen revealed it had brought 400G connectivity to several major markets, including New York City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, with the vendor making strides to offer flexible solutions that cater to customer needs, subsequently revitalizing its network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings.

According to Lumen, its wavelength solutions now provide connectivity to more than 125 cloud on-ramps, including offerings from vendors like AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle.

The accelerated wavelength offering could prove tantalizing to large AI-focused enterprises who can't afford to wait months for connectivity – a market Lumen has been actively targeting, having already picked up sizable deals with Meta and Microsoft. Upon announcing RapidRoutes, Lumen said the queue-jump offering could help enterprises, hyperscalers, and government organizations that “need to move massive amounts of data quickly.”

CTO Ward previously told SDxCentral that those large customers were bracing for a surge in data center usage, which requires a bolstered network architecture. Through its latest offering, however, Ward said the provider was making strides to scale its network to help companies realize AI's full potential, faster.

“With a 20-day SLA for service delivery and speeds up to 400G on prioritized routes across Lumen’s intercity fiber network, with plans to grow to over 47 million miles by the end of 2028, we’re redefining what it means to connect with confidence and speed,” Ward added.

The RapidRoutes launch comes after Lumen partnered up with Palantir. The collaboration will see Lumen use the data mining firm’s Foundry system and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) across its operations in a bid to streamline functions like decommissioning of aging telecom infrastructure, enabling the provider to migrate to modernized systems.