Livingston Enterprises

Livingston Enterprises, Inc.

Company type	Private
Industry	Computer networking
Founded	1986
Defunct	1997
Fate	Acquired by Lucent Technologies
Number of employees	90 (1996)
Parent	Lucent Technologies (from 1997)

Livingston Enterprises, Inc. was established in 1986 as a firm specializing in computer networking. By the year 1996, the company had a workforce numbering approximately 90 employees.

The organization was engaged in litigation involving USRobotics.

Acquisition by Lucent

In 1997, Lucent Technologies purchased Livingston for $650 million, thereby enhancing Lucent's footprint within the internet services sector.

RADIUS

Livingston was responsible for creating the initial RADIUS authentication protocol. The open source project FreeRADIUS, which has been under development since 1999, maintains a configuration syntax closely aligned with Livingston’s original framework. In 1998, the company introduced the RADIUS Accounting Billing Manager software, broadening its portfolio in network authentication and remote access solutions.

PortMaster

The PortMaster Communications Server marked Livingston's inaugural product launch in 1990. Five years later, in 1995, Cisco licensed the PortMaster Office Router, which served as the foundation for Cisco’s 1020 Dial-on-Demand Asynchronous Router. Further expanding its product line, Livingston released ChoiceNet in 1996—an allowlist-based internet filter designed to operate with PortMaster equipment. The PortMaster 4 model was positioned to compete directly with the Ascend Communications MAX series, solidifying Livingston’s competitive stance within the networking hardware industry.