It is currently owned by Marlin Equity Partners, who established an independent business for its product portfolio to accelerate the development of Optical local area network (OLAN) technology.

Designed for enterprise and government clients, OLAN uses fiber, which is faster, more secure, and more stable compared to traditional copper infrastructure.

Tellabs made several acquisitions and expanded globally in the 1980s and into the 1990s, including Coherent Communications Systems Corp. and Martis Oy in Finland.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported: “Telecom went from boom to bust as venture capital dried up and customers cancelled orders for the sort of equipment made by Tellabs and its competitors, including Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies.” In 2003, following industry trends and after 28 years as a manufacturer, Tellabs sold its last plant in Illinois and outsourced its manufacturing.

They purchased Advanced Fiber Communications (AFC), a provider of broadband access solutions with a customer base of more than 800 service providers worldwide at the time of the merger in a deal worth $1.9 billion[9] and Marconi Communications North American Access, which sold fiber-access services to regional Bell operating companies and local exchange carriers.

[13] In 2009 Tellabs acquired WiChorus, a San-Jose based Silicon Valley start-up with a mobile packet core platform, a decision that led to the decline of their data business.

[17] The Optical Transport, Metro Ethernet and Mobility business units of Tellabs were spun off into Coriant, a separate company owned by Marlin Equity.

Schroder is a telecom industry veteran with past experience running global multi-site organizations in Asia, Europe and across the U.S. on behalf of AFC, Marconi, RELTEC, DSC and Siemens.

Converting the signal used by FiOS service providers to the frequency and framing being used in the PON system and coordinating the multiplexing between the conversion devices on the optical network terminals (ONTs) located on the customers' premises.

Tellabs Optical Network Terminals provide narrowband and broadband subscriber services over a PON platform to the IP/Ethernet end-points; all services are supported natively over a single fiber, including analog voice, VoIP, high-speed data, IP video, RF video, smart buildings apps, security, surveillance, environmental and automation for modern high-performance LANs.

It provides centralized intelligence and element management across the entire LAN, from OLT to ONT and extends to subtended powered devices.

Tellabs describes its PON Manager as helping define LAN resources in software and then dynamically allocate them, based on real-time requirements.

Tellabs offers multiple packages: Advanced Availability Software Package builds LANs that minimize annual network downtime while lowering costs, reducing human error, and improving security; Tellabs Advanced Operational Software Package improves IT efficiencies by increasing the speed of LAN configurations, monitoring, troubleshooting and MACs while once again reducing human error and network security risks; and Tellabs Advanced Security Software Package enhances physical LAN defensibility, enabling consistent protection policies that are centrally managed while continuing to reduce human error and increasing network stability.