The impact of the global pandemic has made it clear how important the network truly is. CenturyLink is a key provider in the Internet ecosystem with one of the largest and most well-connected global backbones. In roughly a month’s time, CenturyLink experienced a 35% increase in overall Internet traffic as people moved to work from home and consumed more video and gaming entertainment while staying in. Our Internet backbone was able to handle the load because of the resilience we built into the core of the network and the headroom available as a result of good planning and engineering practices. Where network capacities did became constrained, our fiber-based infrastructure was able to be quickly augmented to deliver more backbone capacity, as well as incremental capacity to our business customers providing critical services to support at home users. Our highly scalable fiber-based infrastructure combined with software-defined network capabilities allows for rapid provisioning of services. If remote working becomes the new norm, then we may find ourselves redefining what “business” provisioning really means and how it will take place.
This unusual time has reinforced our belief that our combination of wide-ranging fiber infrastructure, smart technologies and experienced technicians will allow us to meet our customers’ changing needs, now and into the future.