Alcatel-Lucent has opened a dedicated facility in Tokyo designed to give service providers and enterprise customers hands-on experience in the co-creation of new ultra-broadband and cloud-based services and applications. 

According to Alcatel-Lucent, Customer Network Center (CNC) has been created to make networking trends, most notably the trend towards cloud-based networking, tangible for customers. In the CNC, Alcatel-Lucent customers can participate in interactive demonstrations and co-creation opportunities that lead to the creation of new business models.

Among the platforms in the center are Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBandTM NFV technology and Nuage Networks, Alcatel-Lucent’s ‘in-house start-up’ venture focused on SDN solutions that applies advanced levels of programmability and automation to the cloud-optimized network.

The Customer Network Center in Tokyo will extend Alcatel-Lucent’s Central NFV Competency Center in Naperville, near Chicago in the United States, providing remote access via the cloud in Tokyo. This will allow for demos and interoperability testing of virtualized solutions over the CloudBand NFV platform to support Alcatel-Lucent’s Japan NFV/Network Transformation initiative which is already under way in Japan.

With 51 million LTE subscribers, Japan represents the world’s second largest market for LTE growth after the United States.