The short answer. Lumen Intelligent Internet is dedicated enterprise internet that you buy, scale, and manage digitally. Launched on September 21, 2026 as the next evolution of Lumen Internet On-Demand, it runs from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps, is controlled through Lumen Connect or Lumen’s APIs, and bills either by the hour or on a 12 to 60 month term with a committed floor you can flex above. It removes the need to buy for your peak. It does not, by itself, stop you paying for capacity nobody is using.
What Lumen launched
Lumen announced Intelligent Internet on September 21, 2026 as the next version of its enterprise internet offering. It is available to enterprise customers at more than 10 million US business locations, scales up to 100 Gbps, and, where a location is already enabled for Lumen’s Network-as-a-Service platform, activates in as little as five minutes. Lumen quotes a service availability SLA of up to 99.99%.
Lumen’s argument is that compute and storage have scaled on demand for years while enterprise internet stayed fixed, and that AI makes demand harder to forecast. It cites IDC research from June 2026: 37% of enterprises saw bandwidth grow more than 50% year over year, and 29% struggled to align their networks with AI workloads.
Four early customers were named at launch: iVision, SABIS, Skyway Studios, and the New York Yankees. The Yankees use it to run at peak capacity on game days and cut bandwidth sharply when the stadium is closed, according to Fierce Network’s coverage of the launch.
Intelligent Internet vs Internet On-Demand
Lumen’s support documentation says it directly: Internet On-Demand has evolved into Intelligent Internet, and Lumen confirmed the rebrand to its partners. If you already run Internet On-Demand, you are already on the service; Lumen’s support pages now cover both names.
What carries over:
- Dedicated, symmetrical internet delivered on Lumen’s Network-as-a-Service platform
- Self-service control in Lumen Connect and through Lumen’s APIs
- Hourly pay-as-you-go billing by the selected bandwidth tier
- Bandwidth changes in place, without a change order
What Lumen introduced at launch:
- The Intelligent Internet name
- Term-based pricing: a fixed monthly rate for a committed bandwidth floor over 12 to 60 months, with the ability to flex above it on demand
- Pre-ordering with a new Lumen Fabric Port
- Availability at more than 10 million US business locations, with bandwidth from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps
- DDoS Essentials and Lumen Defender offered as add-ons through the same portal
Anyone searching for Lumen Internet On-Demand pricing, billing, or eligibility is now reading about Intelligent Internet. The rest of this guide applies to both names.
Intelligent Internet vs traditional dedicated internet access
Both are dedicated, enterprise-grade internet. The difference is who controls the capacity and how often it can move. Lumen still sells conventional dedicated internet access (DIA) alongside Intelligent Internet.
| Traditional DIA | Lumen Intelligent Internet | |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Fixed at the ordered rate for the contract | Changed in place, from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps |
| Changing speed | Change order and a new provisioning timeline | Minutes, in Lumen Connect or through the API |
| Billing | Fixed monthly rate for the term | By the hour at the selected tier, or a committed floor on a term with flex above it |
| Sizing | Buy for the peak | Buy for the baseline, flex for the peak |
| Buying | Quote, contract, install | Quote and activate online where the location is NaaS-enabled |
For an enterprise internet buyer the practical question is no longer “how big a circuit do we need?” but “how much capacity do we need at each hour, and who moves it?”. The first question has a one-time answer. The second needs a schedule.
What Lumen Intelligent Internet costs
Lumen published these pay-as-you-go rates on its product page on September 24, 2026. Each is a “starting at” price. The last column is what a connection costs if it stays at that tier for an average 730-hour month.
| Bandwidth | Hourly rate | Left on all month (730 hours) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Mbps (backup) | $0.30 | $219.00 |
| 50 Mbps | $0.37 | $270.10 |
| 100 Mbps | $0.47 | $343.10 |
| 1 Gbps | $1.06 | $773.80 |
| 10 Gbps | $3.93 | $2,868.90 |
Three more costs belong in any model:
- The Fabric Port. Lumen says Intelligent Internet starts with a Lumen Fabric Port, which gives access to its NaaS platform. The port has its own minimum term and early termination charges.
- Term pricing. The 12 to 60 month option is quoted by Lumen sales rather than published.
- Security add-ons. DDoS Essentials and Lumen Defender are priced separately.
Lumen is also running a launch offer through October 30, 2026: NaaS customers who buy a new Fabric Port (minimum one-year term) with Intelligent Internet or Ethernet Fabric Connect at 1, 10, or 100 Gbps, in one eligible continental US location, get a 100% credit on eligible bandwidth charges for three months. Read the offer terms before counting on it.
The catch: on demand only saves money when someone turns it down
Hourly charges follow the bandwidth tier a connection is set to, not the traffic that crosses it. A connection left at 1 Gbps bills at the 1 Gbps rate for every hour of the month, including nights and weekends when nobody is using it. Elastic capacity is only cheaper if somebody, or something, actually moves it.
Take a site that is busy 12 hours a day, 22 weekdays a month. That is 264 business hours out of 730.
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Saving |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps, always on | $773.80 | |
| 1 Gbps in business hours, 100 Mbps otherwise | $498.86 | $274.94 (35.5%) |
| 1 Gbps in business hours, 50 Mbps otherwise | $452.26 | $321.54 (41.6%) |
| 10 Gbps, always on | $2,868.90 | |
| 10 Gbps in business hours, 1 Gbps otherwise | $1,531.48 | $1,337.42 (46.6%) |
These use Lumen’s starting-at hourly rates and leave out Fabric Port and add-on charges. Across 20 sites at 1 Gbps, the business-hours schedule with a 100 Mbps floor is worth about $66,000 a year. Nobody captures that by logging in to a carrier portal twice a day, which is why most on-demand connections sit at full speed around the clock.
Hourly or term: which pricing model makes scheduling pay
The two pricing models save money in different ways.
| Hourly (pay as you go) | Term (12 to 60 months) | |
|---|---|---|
| You pay for | The tier selected, every hour | A fixed monthly rate for a committed floor, plus capacity used above it |
| How scheduling saves | Drop to a low tier outside operating hours | Commit to the baseline and flex above it for peaks, instead of committing to the peak |
| Scaling down | To any supported tier | Back to the committed floor, not below it |
| Best for | Long idle periods, events, seasonal sites, projects | A steady baseline with predictable peaks, and finance teams that need a fixed floor |
Lumen’s documentation says a monthly-billed connection can add bandwidth and later decrease to its original contracted bandwidth, and that an hourly connection can be moved to monthly term billing later.
A rule of thumb: if a site is idle for more hours than it is busy, hourly usually wins. If it carries real load around the clock with peaks on top, a term floor sized to the baseline, with flex above it, usually wins. Either way, the saving only exists if the capacity moves. Model both before signing.
Automating it with Vigilis Flux
Vigilis Flux is the scheduling and control layer for exactly this problem. It schedules Lumen Intelligent Internet connections on both hourly and term pricing, and records every change it makes.
- Scheduled flexing. Set each site’s operating hours and days once. Flux restores full capacity before the site opens and steps it down after close, every day, at every site.
- Automatic right-sizing. Auto-Flux raises bandwidth when utilization stays above 80% and lowers it when it stays below 20%, with cooldowns, a guard against bouncing between tiers, and a dry run that shows what it would have done before you switch it on. It stays inside the carrier’s cap of 24 changes per circuit in a rolling 24 hours.
- Known events. Game days, weekend services, month-end close, and migrations break a fixed weekly pattern. A one-time scheduled change raises capacity for that window and the weekly schedule resumes afterward, which is the same pattern the Yankees describe.
- Term connections. Flux holds a term-priced connection at its committed floor, raises it for the peak, and returns it to the floor when the peak passes, so the commitment can be sized to the baseline.
See bandwidth management software for how Flux works across carriers, or model a connection in the Bandwidth Savings Calculator.
Who it fits, and who it does not
Good fits:
- AI and large data movement: training data, imaging files, replication and migration windows
- Seasonal and event demand: retail peaks, launches, venues, live events
- Offices and branches with set operating hours
- Backup and disaster-recovery sites that sit near idle until they are needed, which is what Lumen’s 1 Mbps backup tier is for
- New, temporary, or pop-up locations that need connectivity quickly
Poor fits:
- Locations under flat, round-the-clock load, where every hour is a busy hour
- Locations that are not NaaS-enabled and cannot take a Fabric Port
- Sites on a fixed DIA contract with years left to run, until the early termination charge has been modeled
Security: DDoS Essentials and Lumen Defender
Lumen offers two security add-ons through the same portal. DDoS Essentials detects and mitigates common volumetric DDoS attacks in real time. Lumen Defender blocks malicious internet traffic at the network edge. Both draw on Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs threat intelligence.
Check two limits before designing around them. Neither add-on is available on IPv6 or dual-stack configurations, and Lumen Defender is not available above 1 Gbps. Confirm with Lumen how Defender behaves on a connection you plan to flex above 1 Gbps.
Evaluation checklist
Before moving a site to Intelligent Internet, or scheduling one you already have, confirm:
- The location is NaaS-enabled or can take a Fabric Port, and you know the port’s term and early termination charges.
- Hourly or term billing was chosen on the numbers, not by default.
- The available tiers cover both the site’s floor and its real peak.
- Utilization data covers a full operating cycle, including month-end and seasonal peaks.
- The exceptions to the normal week are written down.
- Someone owns approval of capacity changes, and someone can override them.
- The expected bill has been modeled before the first production change.
- The security add-on limits (IPv6, dual stack, Defender above 1 Gbps) fit the design.
Related
- Bandwidth management software, the Vigilis Flux scheduling and control layer described here
- WAN bandwidth management, for scheduling capacity across many sites and handling the exceptions
- Network as a Service, for where on-demand capacity fits the wider operating models
- Bandwidth Savings Calculator, to model a connection against its rate tiers
Primary sources
- Lumen launches Intelligent Internet (press release, September 21, 2026)
- Lumen Intelligent Internet product page and pricing
- Lumen Intelligent Internet data sheet
- Lumen Intelligent Internet support documentation
- Updating Intelligent Internet bandwidth
- Updating the Intelligent Internet billing method
- Lumen NaaS connectivity offer
- Fierce Network: AI is breaking bandwidth forecasts
- Channel Dive: Lumen ties flexible internet commissions to what customers actually use