Fiber, LLC

Company overview. Fiber, LLC is a Wyoming limited liability company with its principal place of business at 621 17th Street, Suite 801, Denver, Colorado. It is privately held, with no publicly disclosed parent, employees, or revenue; no ticker or headcount band could be verified from public sources. Corporate filings and USPTO submissions describe it as the successor to AFN, LLC (Denver) and as related to Astarte Fiber Networks (Boulder, CO), the 1990s optical-switching developer whose technology it now holds.

Products / services / operations. Fiber, LLC has no verifiable ongoing operations, manufacturing, or product sales. Its own litigation filings state it "has maintained the rights to the technology since 2000, and, in the last year, decided to enforce its rights" — i.e., it functions as a patent-holding and assertion vehicle. The portfolio centers on two patents, U.S. 6,430,332 and U.S. 7,095,917, both titled "Optical Switching Apparatus" (inventors Herzel Laor, David A. Krozier, Leo A. Plouffe). The technology covers free-space/micromirror-based optical switches and servo control of beam-directing mirrors, developed in a 1990s joint project between Astarte and Texas Instruments; TI's rights were assigned to Astarte and then to AFN, LLC. Astarte itself, a real operating switch vendor, was acquired by Tellium in 2000.

Patent-litigation posture. The case data is one-sided: four suits as plaintiff and one proceeding as defendant. All four affirmative suits — against NEC, Ciena, Viavi/JDS Uniphase, and Alcatel-Lucent (later Nokia of America) — were filed in Fiber's home venue, the District of Colorado, not an Eastern District of Texas-style plaintiff venue. The single defendant-side entry is the PTAB inter partes review (IPR2013-00318/00336) brought by JDS Uniphase, a defensive challenge to Fiber's assertion campaign rather than an infringement case. This pattern is characteristic of a non-practicing patent holder enforcing an acquired portfolio against optical-networking vendors.

Notable cases or context. Fiber accused Ciena, Finisar, Viavi, Lumentum, and Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent of infringing claims covering reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) and wavelength-selective-switch components. The consolidated Colorado cases ended in a stipulated final judgment of invalidity and non-infringement (Sept. 13, 2018), after claim construction held the term "control" indefinite; the Federal Circuit affirmed on Nov. 21, 2019 (Fiber, LLC v. Ciena Corp., No. 2019-1005).