How to reduce a Lumen IoD (Lumen Internet On-Demand) bill

The short answer: A Lumen IoD connection left at 1 Gbps for a 730-hour month costs $773.80 at Lumen’s starting rate. Set to 1 Gbps for 264 business hours and 100 Mbps otherwise, it costs $498.86, a saving of $274.94, or 35.5%. Lumen bills the tier, not the traffic, so lower it when the site is quiet.

Lumen Internet On-Demand is now sold as Lumen Intelligent Internet. Turn the bandwidth down when nobody is using it, and turn it back up before they need it. Vigilis Flux makes those changes for you, on a schedule or automatically.

Why the bill is high

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 the nights and weekends when nobody is in the building.

On-demand bandwidth is only cheaper than a fixed circuit if somebody, or something, actually moves it. Most on-demand connections sit at full speed around the clock, because nobody is going to log in to a carrier portal twice a day at every site.

Step 1: find the idle hours

Look at utilization for each connection before you change anything.

Use a full billing cycle, not one typical week, so month-end processing and reporting runs show up.
Look at the peak inside the quiet window, not the average across it.
Find the backup and replication jobs. They often run exactly when a site looks idle, and they are the most common cause of a bad schedule.
Check out-of-hours access: VPN users, on-call staff, and anything another team has scheduled.

Step 2: pick the low tier

The low tier has to carry the peak inside the quiet window, not zero. A branch that runs a nightly backup needs enough overnight capacity for the backup to finish. Start cautious. You can step down again after a clean month.

Step 3: work out the numbers

Take a site that is busy 12 hours a day, 22 weekdays a month. That is 264 business hours out of 730. At Lumen’s starting-at hourly rates:

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 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. For the rates behind the table, see Lumen Internet On-Demand pricing per hour.

To run your own hours and tiers, use the Bandwidth Savings Calculator.

Step 4: decide who moves the tier

There are three ways to make the change happen every day.

By hand, in Lumen Connect. Lumen says customers can adjust bandwidth in minutes through Lumen Connect or its API, with no change order. It needs no extra tool, and it only works if someone remembers every evening and every morning.
Your own script against Lumen’s API. Possible, and you then own the clock, the retries, the records, and the exceptions. See automating Lumen bandwidth changes through the NaaS API.
A scheduler. Vigilis Flux schedules bandwidth on Lumen Internet On-Demand and Lumen Intelligent Internet connections and records every change.

Step 5: plan for the exceptions

Every site has days when its normal schedule is wrong: a game day, a weekend service, month-end close, a migration. A schedule with no way to handle those gets switched off the first time it causes a complaint, and the saving goes with it.

Write the exceptions down before you start. For each one, you need to hold or raise capacity for a known window and then return to the normal pattern.

What a schedule cannot fix

Flat, round-the-clock load. If every hour is a busy hour, there are no idle hours to lower.
The Fabric Port, taxes, and fees. They do not move with the bandwidth tier.
A term connection’s floor. A term-priced connection can come back down to its committed floor, not below it. On a term, the saving comes from committing to the baseline and flexing above it for peaks, instead of committing to the peak.

How Vigilis Flux does this

Vigilis Flux works on Lumen Internet On-Demand and Lumen Intelligent Internet connections, on hourly and term pricing.

Schedules. It lowers capacity outside operating hours and restores it before the site opens, every day, at every site.
Auto. It raises bandwidth when utilization stays high and lowers it when utilization stays low, inside limits you set, with a dry run that shows what it would have done before you switch it on.
Known events. A one-time change raises capacity for a window, and the weekly schedule resumes afterward.
Records. Every change is recorded.

Vigilis Flux is a $15 per service, per month add-on to any Vigilis plan. The price covers both modes, and there is no platform fee.

Lumen Internet On-Demand pricing per hour
Lumen bandwidth scheduling best practices
Lumen bandwidth schedulers compared
Lumen Intelligent Internet guide
WAN bandwidth management, for scheduling capacity across many sites

Primary sources

Common questions

How do I reduce my Lumen IoD (Lumen Internet On-Demand) bill?

Lower the bandwidth tier when the site is quiet and raise it before demand returns. Lumen bills each hour at the rate of the tier the connection is set to, so every hour spent at a lower tier costs less. Vigilis Flux does this on Lumen Internet On-Demand and Lumen Intelligent Internet connections, on a schedule or automatically from measured utilization.

Why is my Lumen Internet On-Demand bill so high?

Most often because the connection sits at its top tier around the clock. Hourly charges follow the 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.

How much can scheduling save on a Lumen hourly connection?

It depends on the hours and the tiers. As a worked example at Lumen's starting rates, a site busy for 264 of the 730 hours in a month pays $773.80 at 1 Gbps always on, and $498.86 at 1 Gbps in business hours and 100 Mbps otherwise. That is $274.94 less, or 35.5 percent. The example leaves out Fabric Port and add-on charges.

Does using less bandwidth lower the bill?

Not by itself. The charge follows the bandwidth tier, not the traffic. Turning off a backup job or shaping traffic lowers the usage graph and leaves the bill where it was. The tier itself has to change.

Can a schedule lower a term-priced Lumen connection?

Only down to its committed floor. Term pricing fixes a monthly rate for a committed bandwidth floor and lets the connection flex above it. A schedule saves on a term connection by committing to the baseline and raising capacity for peaks, not by dropping below the floor.

What does Vigilis Flux cost?

Vigilis Flux is a $15 per service, per month add-on to any Vigilis plan. The price covers both modes, schedule and Auto, and there is no platform fee.