AboveNet Church Solutions

Lakewood Church

Overview of Lakewood
Lakewood Church is a non-denominational Christian megachurch located in Houston, Texas. It is the largest congregation in the United States, averaging more than 43,500 in attendance per week. The 17,000-seat Lakewood Central Campus, home to four English and two Spanish language services per week, is located at the former Compaq Center. Joel Osteen is the pastor of Lakewood Church. His wife Victoria serves as co-pastor. Lakewood Church is evangelical in belief.

The church offers a unique experience via the Internet complete with sermon broadcasts, blogs, counseling and suggestions for connecting and serving both international and local and communities.

Business Need
The Internet is key to the Lakewood Church’s success and ability to communicate with its congregation.

With a massive following, the demands on the Lakewood Church network are significant. For example, the Church’s site receives more than a million page views per month—and that is the easy part.
The Church’s Internet site also offers a wide array of content including live broadcasts, downloadable weekly sermons and services and hundreds of resources and programs to people all over the world.  So it has a unique set of requirements. Business continuity, scalability and storage capacity are essential to the Church’s ability to continue to minister to a worldwide congregation.

Technical Needs
Lakewood Church depends heavily upon its IP connectivity to meet the needs of an ever growing local and global congregation. The church uses its IP services to provide online access to sermons and ministry activities, as well as to sell books, CDs and spiritual aids from its online store. As a result, the Church needs a diverse, scalable and secure solution that provides control over the information flow and ability to grow with its international community. 

Prior to working with AboveNet, Lakewood Church’s servers were collocated with another  provider and their network experts did not have direct access to the servers nor ultimate control to respond to potential problems.

In addition to direct control, Lakewood needed a network to facilitate connectivity between the Church’s Central Campus and key data center sites. The path of the church’s previous data network travelled through an area of Houston that was prone to flooding and unprotected, so a street-level option was a preferred part of a new solution.  

AboveNet proposed a fiber solution with no additional equipment, cards, or aerial fiber that could become the source of an outage. After conferring with several providers and reviewing various solutions, Lakewood Church chose the AboveNet solution over all others.

The AboveNet Solution
AboveNet delivered a dual, diverse, Gigabit Metro IP solution to meet the customer’s needs. In addition to the high bandwidth Internet connectivity, AboveNet also provides Lakewood Church with an additional level of control of the information flow on its network.
AboveNet provides the services at street-level to ease the concern associated with frequent flooding and enabled Lakewood Church to move their servers in-house with direct access, significant savings, and the data security it required.

Why AboveNet was Selected
Lakewood Church chose AboveNet over several competitors who sought to win the ability to provide the church’s Internet connectivity. AboveNet was selected because it is able to provide a Tier 1, diverse, fiber-based IP solution. Other providers were only able to suggest a third-party (Tier 2) network solution. 

With AboveNet, Lakewood has the assurance that it will never be down, and its members and seekers will be able to access the resources and information to participate in the church’s international community.

Lakewood also considered AboveNet’s established track record and its knowledgeable professional services team and service-level guarantees.

AboveNet Service Benefits
Lakewood now has a dedicated, diverse IP network to meet its Internet access needs.
Leveraging its dense metro assets, AboveNet was able to provide IP connectivity at the customer premises that performs as though the customer were sitting at the IP PoP.  AboveNet’s established expertise in providing robust, high bandwidth connectivity provides a level of technical sophistication that others simply cannot offer.

The church is now able to manage their Internet access and network traffic, and is no longer dependent on third parties for this critical piece of its connectivity solution. With the AboveNet solution, Lakewood Church has access to its data and a level of control and reliability that it never had before.

AboveNet’s expansive footprint in the Houston area and major metro markets across the U.S. also means that Lakewood Church can easily scale its high bandwidth network to meet the future demands of its growing business. 

About AboveNet, Inc.
AboveNet, Inc. provides high bandwidth connectivity solutions for business and carriers. Its private optical network delivers key network and IP services in and among top U.S. and European markets. AboveNet's network is widely used in demanding markets such as financial services, media, health care, retail and government.