I used to describe Cogent as a GNAT in telecom. An annoying little gnat buzzing around The Large Elephant in the Room.
They're a free loading gnat still aggregating less than one billion in annual sales. To have them mentioned in the same sentence with Lumen is a Wall Street hoax. Level 3 used to correctly state, "we don't consider Cogent a competitor." There was a dispute as you should recall, with Level 3 having to force them to the table to pay for cheats on "traffic exchange." They don't build or create anything, while being confined to small&medium enterprises inside the last mile.
The CFO referenced BLL as part of today's conference call as being the most exciting "near term" growth opportunity that will stick considering its patented, proprietary intellectual property. He said it this way:
"On the innovation piece, by the fall, we will have launched Lumen Defender, which is our Black Lotus Labs based IP blocking a security product...
I would say we're excited about two things in the near term. The first is again big connectivity deals. There's a lot of conversation going on right now across large enterprise and hyperscalers. The second is our security product. Black Lotus Labs is a unique asset that is ours and we blocked a nation-state threats since the beginning of the year. We see $200 billion net flows a day and we know who the bad guys are and continue to identify new ones.
So I think our ability to monetize that and bring value to enterprise near term is probably one of the faster to scale products you'll see."
Best to continue to answer your product/growth questions through management's own words on the recent earnings call:
Now, despite these pressures, we did maintain sequential and year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 within our North America enterprise grow product portfolio, and we also made material traction in driving customer adoption of our flagship digital offering, network as a service or Lumen NaaS, both important components of our turnaround story.
All right. Let's talk about ExaSwitch. We created this award winning high capacity optical switching platform to meet the demands of hyperscaler peering, while also functioning as a high capacity on ramp to the public cloud for enterprises. Now, the need to reimagine multi-cloud connectivity has never been more important as AI, autonomous systems and exploding data growth redefine enterprise networking and security needs, every millisecond counts. That's why ExaSwitch use cases are extending far beyond hyperscaler peering into things like AI exchanges, because it's the only optical switching platform of its kind that can rise to today's performance and security challenges.
Let's look at our mass markets business now. We continue to execute our strategy to deploy capital where we see the greatest opportunities for growth, and we're on track to deliver more than 500,000 new fiber enabled locations this year, and we're optimizing our pre-sales motions to drive penetration into those assets as quickly as possible.
Finally, and most importantly, our sales growth engines within our business and mass market segments accelerated in the first quarter as we saw a strong improvement in performance within both North American enterprise sales with a 27% year-over-year growth and quantum fiber broadband net additions. All of this gives us confidence in our 2024 guidance, with EBITDA expected to improve from a low point in the first quarter.
Finally, we're taking a major step forward in security innovation by launching an exciting new subscription service that leverages patented AI powered IP based threat detection and prevention capabilities from Lumen's very own Black Lotus Labs. In the second half of 2024, this security service called Lumen Defender will be broadly available on our NaaS and DIA connections, enabling enterprise customers to have more secure connectivity as we help identify and block threats at the network level.
,,,new logos are selling at a rate that's into double-digits in terms of growth and it really is those growth products, so the motion is working.
Black Lotus Labs is without a doubt a not so secret we-pon, and they have helped keep the country safe. Their value is incredible and we're incredibly proud to have them in our portfolio. The reason why they're so valuable is because they see our network traffic and the capabilities that we're developing and launching in Lumen Defender, take their patented data models and basically enable those to be available in an integrated fashion with our network. Nobody else is doing that right now. So we're excited about the potential value and you will see them as an integral part of our team moving forward.