There has been a lot of confusion from new comers about why gear labelled Lucent, Avaya, Agere and Wavelan all appear to be the same. Below is a great explanation by SamBlackman which was stolen from the PersonalTelco MailingList. -- AdamShand
Lucent was spun out of AT&T in 1996. It was basically the "gear maker" part of AT&T, i.e. the part that didn't own all the network infrastructure. Lucent made a wide variety of telecomm hardware, from circuit switched to optical to wireless equipment.
In year 2000, several years of aggressively bad accounting caught up to Lucent, and they started missing revenue and profit forecasts. The stock got hammered, and management decided that the best way to keep investors happy -- as well as raise cash and decrease debt for the parent company -- would be to spin off business units.
The first unit they spun off was Avaya, which handles business networking stuff. That was in 2000. In a spinoff, the parent company sells a small percentage of the new company to the public -- usually 10 to 20% -- and then gives the rest to current shareholders as a dividend. So last year Lucent shareholders received a certain amount of Avaya stock based on how much Lucent stock they held.
The second unit they spun off was Agere, which was the microelectronics business -- chips and optoelectronics. Orinoco is a division of Agere, and if you want to get really specific was originally a company called WaveLAN that Lucent bought a few years ago.
So: Lucent, Avaya, and Agere are all now completely independent companies. Avaya and Agere used to be divisions of Lucent, but were spun off into their own separate companies. Finally, Orinoco is a division of Agere.