Xtera Communications Inc., an Allen, Texas-based maker of telecom equipment, is drafting documents to raise around $100 million through an initial public offering of stock, according to sources familiar with the matter.

It’s unclear precisely when the company may file the necessary documentation for the IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though sources predict it will happen toward the end of the year or first part of January.

Credit Suisse is the lead underwriter on the deal, according to sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Executives and board members of Xtera could not be reached for comment. Companies that are preparing for IPOs often shun talking to the press out of concern of earning the wrath of the SEC.

Financial data on Xtera wasn’t available, though sources put the company’s annual sales at $80 million to $100 million.

Xtera has raised upward of $275 million since its inception in the 1990s, according to Dallas Business Journal research. That includes a round of $23.4 million with a target of $35 million that it disclosed in an SEC filing earlier this month.

A host of supporters have plugged cash into Xtera over the years, including such Dallas-area venture investors as CenterPoint Ventures, Hook Partners, and Sevin Rosen Funds.

That Xtera is even around today, much less on the cusp of an IPO, may be a surprise to longtime observers of the local telecom scene.

The company was founded in 2000, near the peak of the telecom bubble, and landed around $110 million in funding in January 2001 on a private valuation of nearly $1 billion. That happened just as the telecom industry was starting to collapse.

Xtera sells equipment for what’s known as the “long haul,” or “backbone,” section of voice and data networks, which stretch across states or countries. It’s used to sending large amounts of phone calls and data over long distances, or even underwater, without having to be regenerated.

But large phone and data services companies overbuilt the long-haul part of their networks during the telecom bubble, spurred by copious amounts of investment capital and expectations of nearly unlimited demand for bandwidth.

When the telecom bubble collapsed, spending on the long-haul piece of networks dried up with it, leaving Xtera in a lurch. In 2002, it shifted its business model from making subsystems—which enabled larger boxes from the likes of Nortel Networks to carry more phone calls and data—to full systems used in the long-haul portion of networks. That happened partly because the market for subsystems was worse than that for full systems and partly because large equipment makers had largely halted production of long-haul equipment, making it difficult for Xtera to find technology partners that would develop new products around its subsystem equipment. After current president and CEO Jon Hopper took over in 2004, he cut expenses in half, largely through layoffs, and shifted the company’s sales team to looking outside of U.S. borders, where it had a better chance of winning business. The reason: Many foreign phone and data services carriers are willing to work with a smaller vendor, whereas the major players in the U.S. prefer larger suppliers.