Viavi Brand Guidelines: The 2015 JDSU Spin-Off Behind T-BERD Field Testers

A laser maker, an Ottawa optics firm and a split.

Viavi Solutions is an American network test, measurement and assurance company based in Chandler, Arizona, and it styles its name in capitals as VIAVI. English Wikipedia dates the company itself to August 2015, when JDS Uniphase, known as JDSU, split into two independent businesses: Viavi Solutions and Lumentum Holdings, which took JDSU’s former communications and commercial optical products division.

The older history runs through two companies. English Wikipedia says Uniphase was started in 1979 in a garage in San Jose, California, by former Spectra-Physics employees Dale E. Crane and Bob Jones, and made lasers for chip makers and scanners. In 1981 JDS Optics was founded in Ottawa, Ontario, by Philip Garel-Jones, Gary Duck, Jozef Straus and Bill Sinclair; the initials stand for Jones, Duck and Straus or Sinclair. JDS Optics became JDS Fitel through a partnership with Fitel, a fibre-optic and optical connector company, and in 1999 JDS Fitel and Uniphase merged as JDS Uniphase.

The merged company grew quickly during the telecoms boom, buying further fibre-optic businesses including Optical Coating Laboratory of Santa Rosa, California. After the industry’s downturn it announced a large write-down of goodwill in July 2001, and, Wikipedia says, its workforce fell from nearly 29,000 to about 5,300 as factories closed around the world.

Test equipment came later. On 3 August 2005, Wikipedia says, JDSU bought Acterna, a network-test group, which became part of its Test and Measurement Group; in December 2013 it announced the purchase of Network Instruments, a network performance management company. JDSU had moved its headquarters to Milpitas, California, in 2006. After the 2015 split the test business carried on under the new Viavi name, and in February 2016 Oleg Khaykin became president and chief executive, according to Wikipedia.

Field testers and thin films.

Viavi’s products fall into two families. The larger is network test and assurance. Under the brand names T-BERD in the United States and MTS in Europe it makes compact optical field testers, Wikipedia says; its OneExpert handheld meters are used to install and troubleshoot cable and telephone-line broadband services, and CellAdvisor is a portable tester for radio signals at cell sites. In the laboratory, its Optical Network Tester family is designed for testing high-speed optical network equipment, and its StrataSync platform collects data from its instruments remotely.

The company widened that range through purchases. In February 2018 it agreed to buy the test and measurement business of the British group Cobham, the trade site Converge Digest reported, adding land-mobile radio and avionics test equipment. In December 2024 Viavi announced an agreement to buy Inertial Labs of Leesburg, Virginia, a maker of orientation, positioning and navigation equipment for aerospace, defence and industrial uses; Viavi’s own news releases now describe it as “Inertial Labs, a VIAVI Solutions company.” Its website today lists test equipment for wireless and fibre networks, data centres, military and land-mobile radio, avionics, railway communications, and position, navigation and timing.

The second family is optics. Wikipedia says Viavi’s optical thin-film coating technology is used in light sensors and in 3D sensing, including Microsoft’s Kinect games controller, and in anti-counterfeiting features; the company also makes MicroNIR near-infrared spectrometers for analysing materials in the field. Wikipedia adds that it made a filter assembly that NASA used in the OVIRS instrument on the OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu. Its website lists pigment lines under the ChromaFlair and SpectraFlair names.

Design and documentation.

Test and measurement companies sell instruments that most people never see, and their marketing is built around the screen. Product pages and brochures tend to lead with an oscilloscope display: a dark background, a fine grid of divisions and bright traces in yellow, cyan, magenta and green, each colour standing for a separate channel. The trace is the product’s face, so photographs are often cropped tight on the display rather than on the case around it.

The second familiar image is the laboratory. Signal and spectrum analysers, generators and power supplies appear stacked in racks or lined up on a bench, cables looping between front panels of knobs, soft keys and connectors. Engineers are shown probing a circuit board with a fine tip, reading a waveform while the device under test sits under a lamp or a magnifier. The tone is calm and technical, with product names and model numbers set in plain sans type.

Further along the chain, the pictures move into the factory. Semiconductor test makers show automated chip testers and handlers in clean production areas, staff in protective suits, and wafer probe cards photographed under magnification, where rows of needle-like contacts meet the pads of a chip. Network and wireless test companies favour antennas, fibre spools, base stations and phones in shielded boxes.

The category also meets its customers in person. Trade shows such as electronica in Munich, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are where new instruments are launched and demonstrated live, so stand design, demo screens and printed data sheets carry much of each brand’s visual identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A new name for an old test business.

The Spirent episode shows how the company has grown. In March 2024 Viavi agreed to buy Spirent Communications, the British network-testing company, Converge Digest reported on 5 March 2024; later that month, Wikipedia says, Keysight made a higher offer, and Spirent’s board withdrew its support for Viavi’s bid and recommended Keysight’s. Keysight completed its purchase of Spirent on 15 October 2025, Evertiq reported. As part of the regulatory clearances, Keysight and Spirent agreed to sell Spirent’s high-speed Ethernet, network security and channel emulation business lines, Silicon Semiconductor reported, and on 16 October 2025 Viavi announced that it had completed the purchase of that business from Keysight; Converge Digest reported the closing the same day and named Keysight, Rohde & Schwarz and Anritsu as the companies Viavi would meet in high-speed Ethernet and security testing.

Viavi describes itself in its news releases as a provider of “network test, monitoring and assurance solutions” for telecommunications, cloud, enterprises, first responders, military, aerospace and railway, and as a leader in “light management technologies” for 3D sensing and anti-counterfeiting; its website calls it “a global leader in test and measurement and optical technologies.” Those are the company’s own words. The capitalised VIAVI name heads its website and news releases, while its instrument names carry older lines forward: T-BERD and MTS for fibre and Ethernet field testing, CellAdvisor for radio work at cell sites, OneExpert for broadband installation.

For a design guide, Viavi shows how a company formed by a split can carry long-running instrument names under one new word. Compare Keysight, which bought Spirent after outbidding Viavi, and Anritsu, which Converge Digest named among Viavi’s competitors. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a fibre amber and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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