OFS Brand Guidelines: Lucent’s Fibre Unit, Furukawa’s 2001 Buy & the Lightera Name

An Atlanta fibre business sold by Lucent in 2001.

OFS takes its name from Optical Fiber Solutions, the fibre business of Lucent Technologies, the US telecoms-equipment maker. On 16 November 2001 Lucent announced from Murray Hill, New Jersey, that it had completed the sale of its Atlanta-based Optical Fiber Solutions business to Furukawa Electric of Tokyo, in a press release carried by Light Reading. Furukawa was buying the major portion of the business.

The release set out how the business was divided. Furukawa and the cable maker CommScope would form a venture to operate a portion of OFS, as the companies had announced on 24 July that year. In a separate agreement, Corning was buying the remaining portion: Lucent’s interests in two joint ventures in China, Lucent Technologies Shanghai Fiber Optic and Lucent Technologies Beijing Fiber Optic Cable, subject to approvals including Chinese government approval. Lucent said the sale was one of a series of moves to focus on broadband and mobile infrastructure for large service providers.

The business that emerged under Furukawa was OFS Fitel, LLC, headquartered in Norcross, Georgia, near Atlanta, English Wikipedia says; the encyclopedia describes it as an American company that designs and makes optical fibre, fibre-optic cable and other fibre-optic products.

In 2010 OFS and Hengtong’s Jiangsu Hengtong Optic-Electric set up a joint venture in China, Jiangsu OFS Hengtong Optical Technology. English Wikipedia’s Hengtong article says it was formed to make optical fibre preforms, the glass rods from which fibre is drawn.

AllWave, TrueWave and TeraWave.

OFS fibres are sold under family names that run from land networks to the sea floor. The current Lightera catalogue lists single-mode fibres under the AllWave, TrueWave, TeraWave and EZ-Bend names, and a separate set of ocean fibres for submarine cables, among them TrueWave XL Ocean, TeraWave SCUBA and AllWave Ocean Zero.

The same catalogue covers multimode and specialty fibre, fibre-optic cable for aerial, buried, duct and indoor routes, closures and connectivity, and the InvisiLight range for running fibre inside homes and apartment buildings. It names markets from data centres and telecoms operators to medical, sensing, energy, aerospace and defence, and high-power laser delivery.

Recognition is listed by English Wikipedia: a 2016 Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for contributions toward the pioneering and deployment of fibre-optic cable, and a silver award in the 2016 Cabling Installation & Maintenance Innovators Awards.

The Norcross headquarters campus has had a second life. English Wikipedia says that since the mid-2010s the site has been used for film productions, including Black Panther, Baby Driver and Bad Boys for Life, and that the Georgia Film Academy holds classes there. In 2018, it says, OFS sold 103 acres of the property to Gwinnett County, under an agreement that let the company stay in its space until 2024. The encyclopedia adds that a developer had planned since 2013 to turn the headquarters into a full film studio, that a series of lawsuits with OFS meant the buildings could only be leased, and that as of 2021 it was the second-largest production facility in Georgia after Trilith Studios in Fayetteville.

Fibre, cable and the seabed.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

A lighthouse over three fibre businesses.

The OFS name now sits inside a larger brand. On 6 March 2025 Furukawa Electric announced, in a release datelined Norcross, that it would unify its three optical fibre cable businesses — the Fiber Cable Division in Japan, OFS Fitel, LLC and Furukawa Electric LATAM — under a new business brand, Lightera, launched on 1 April 2025 at the OFC conference in San Francisco. Lightwave reported the plan on 25 March 2025. The company says the name “signifies a new era powered by light” and that the Lightera logo is inspired by a lighthouse. The ofsoptics.com address forwards to lightera.com, whose About page describes Lightera as uniting Furukawa Electric, OFS and Furukawa Electric LatAm.

The release gave the reasons in terms of markets: Furukawa said the new organisation reflects demand from generative AI, data centres, 5G and 6G, utilities, medical, aerospace, defence and sensing. It named a single chairman and chief executive and a president and chief operating officer for the combined business, and said Lightera would run through regional organisations for North America, Latin America with Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific, plus a global Specialty Photonics operation, supported by eight corporate functions. Lightwave described the same plan as four regional divisions.

On where its products are made, Lightera says it has manufacturing facilities, support centres and research and development hubs on five continents. Its site lists Norcross as corporate headquarters, further US sites in Avon, Connecticut; Carrollton, Georgia; Somerset, New Jersey; and Sturbridge, Massachusetts, production centres in Mexicali, Mexico, and Curitiba, Brazil, and other locations in countries including Germany, Morocco, Japan, India and Thailand.

For a design guide, OFS shows how a fibre name can pass from a telecoms-equipment maker to a Japanese cable group and then sit inside a new umbrella brand. Compare Corning, which bought part of Lucent’s fibre business in 2001, and Hengtong, OFS’s joint-venture partner in China. For this guide we use a night navy, a lamp amber and a pale mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep OFS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.