Lucent Technologies, Inc. was the telecommunications equipment company spun off from AT&T in 1996 (April 1996 IPO; full share distribution September 30, 1996), headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and formed around AT&T's manufacturing units plus Bell Labs. Press coverage at separation described a roughly 125,000-employee business whose predecessor AT&T unit had reported about $21.4 billion in 1995 revenue (NJBIZ; Chicago Tribune). It stopped being an independent public company when it merged with France's Alcatel on November 30, 2006 to create Alcatel-Lucent, which was in turn acquired by Nokia (completed 2016) and folded into Nokia Networks with the Alcatel-Lucent brand retired (Wikipedia; Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent filings). The "Lucent Technologies, Inc." name continues to appear in litigation and within the Nokia corporate family; its current standalone legal or financial status could not be independently verified.
Products / operations. Lucent supplied carrier communications infrastructure: central-office switching, optical/transport systems, wireless (CDMA/UMTS) network equipment, data networking products, and communications semiconductors and optoelectronic components, along with network design, deployment and managed services. Bell Labs was its R&D arm. It also spun off Avaya (2000) and its microelectronics unit as Agere Systems (2001), and announced software ventures such as Inferno and Elemedia (ZDNet; PCMag).
Patent-litigation posture. In the tracked data Lucent appears only as a defendant (0 plaintiff cases, 1 defendant case), consistent with an operating equipment vendor being targeted rather than an assertive licensor. It was one of several networking vendors named in Fenner Investments, Ltd. v. Juniper Networks, Inc. et al., filed January 6, 2005 in the Eastern District of Texas—a venue long favored by patent plaintiffs. Fenner is a Texas patent-holding limited partnership asserting inventor Peter R. Fenner's patents, i.e., a non-practicing holder.
Case context. Fenner alleged Lucent's Access Point Products infringed U.S. Patent 6,819,670; the parties settled in December 2005 and claims and counterclaims were dismissed without prejudice. Historically Lucent was also an active patent enforcer itself, notably in the Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft audio-coding litigation.