It was cleaved off AT&T as part of Lucent and then merged with Alcatel. Part of the problem there was that it was never clear if Lucent merged with Alcatel or if Alcatel acquired Lucent. The whole company was pretty dysfunctional but nothing too unusual there.

Nokia came along flush with MS money from the sale of their handset business to buy Alcatel Lucent and got Bell Labs for free. Neither company was doing particularly well flogging network gear and together they didn’t do much better.

I suppose even if they had the funding the company itself is at it's value extraction phase.

They are now owned by Nokia.