Adtran Buys Luminous Embers

At least a piece of packet transport vendor Luminous Networks has found a home at Adtran Inc. (Nasdaq: ADTN)

Sources say Adtran has completed an acquisition of Luminous assets. No pricing information was available at press time. Luminous's Website even redirected to Adtran's for a brief time last week, although that situation has since been changed.

Adtran wouldn't comment when asked about the deal.

Luminous declared its shutdown at the end of last year. (See (Luminous Loses Its Luster.) The company reportedly was wrapping up affairs with a skeleton crew, operating out of an office in the charming Silicon Valley suburb of Campbell, Calif. Could be true -- there's a phone number for "Luminous Networks" in Campbell, but it's been disconnected.

Luminous's closing ended a seven-year, $183 million quest to bring Resilient Packet Ring Technology to the telecom masses. Rival RPR firm Lantern fared a little better, getting acquired by C-COR Corp. (Nasdaq: CCBL), but the ending wasn't much happier. Early this year, C-COR shut down the Sunnyvale, Calif., facility that was Lantern's home, although not all the employees were laid off immediately. (See C-COR Extinguishes Lantern.)

Not that it's all sunshine and rainbows at Adtran. The company's stock got pummeled earlier this month when Adtran lowered its first-quarter guidance. (See Adtran Lowers Guidance.)

Who's left in RPR? Well, there's always Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Nortel Networks Ltd. , which were shipping similar technologies before the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) 802.17 standard formalized RPR. Corrigent Systems Inc. is still kicking as well, and the stock of its parent, Orckit Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq: ORCT), did well in calendar 2005 despite some stomach-turning dips. (See Orckit, the Killer Stock.)

— Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading