Intelsat Leverages Lumen to Connect Billions of Customers Across Land, Sea, and Air

Since its founding in 1964 and live broadcast of the moon landing in 1969, Intelsat has been one of the world’s biggest operators of geostationary satellites. The company is involved in everything from in-flight Wi-Fi and precision farming to broadcasts of the Summer Games. Today, Intelsat serves the world’s top mobile network operators with a hybrid, satellite and terrestrial network.

“Intelsat has been a one-stop shop for the better part of 30 years,” says Vinit Duggal, SVP of Networks, and CISO at Intelsat. “Our goal is to interlace our technology and stay ultra-focused on successful client outcomes.”

Intelsat’s focus often lies far beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, but they faced a large-scale project that would shift their sights much closer to home: reinforcing their terrestrial network.

Expanding the speed and scale of a ground network

Intelsat continues to push the limits of what’s possible and consider new methods of growth. They determined that growing their global connectivity would help their customers—mainly service providers—deliver more value through their own services. To continue expanding on their vision of next-generation connectivity, Intelsat wanted to enhance the speed, scale and reliability of their ground network.

This project required a determined, world-class technology partner. Dan Pitts, Senior Manager of Service Engineering at Intelsat, knew that Lumen would be the right choice. The companies’ shared emphasis on customer success was one of the key elements that drew them together. Pitts also liked the fact that Lumen owns its fiber network, which helps deliver security, reliability and confidence for customers.

“We needed Lumen in order to build our backbone,” Pitts says. “They’re our primary vendor and offer a level of transparency unmatched by other vendors.”

With the help of Lumen, Intelsat could link their teleports (also known as satellite ground stations) back to their PoPs, tying all of their facilities together. They could then quickly carry content back to wherever the customer wanted to view it, enhancing the speed and connectivity of the service.

Increased bandwidth and hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings

Intelsat primarily leverages two Lumen products: Lumen® Wavelength Solutions and Lumen® High Speed IP Service (HSIP). These products provide a connective tissue to Intelsat’s backbone and provide plenty of additional headspace as their needs grow.

“What Lumen really did was understand our problem,” Duggal says. “They took the time to understand what was happening, what we needed, what our customers needed, and what solutions we could deliver together.”

With increased bandwidth and secure IP transit, Intelsat has:

• Saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating outdated technologies.
• Upgraded their backbone from 10 GB to 100 GB, allowing them to bring on new customers without worrying about quality or speed of service.
• Reduced unnecessary capital expenditures and invested more resources into new projects and customer success.

Intelsat has been a proud Lumen customer for 20 years and counting. They look forward to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with better service, better solutions and a shared goal of connecting the world.

To see how Lumen supports pioneers like Intelsat, read more of our customer success stories.

Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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