The Pacific Wave Layer-2 facilities are being used by many networks to further research and educational goals and initiatives. For a list of Application Projects, see Application Projects.

New Pacific Wave Participants

  • KAREN moves from Seattle to Los Angeles
  • GLORIAD joins the exchange in Seattle
  • CLARA is back on the exchange!
  • JGN2Plus joins the public exchange

For a complete listing of Pacific Wave Participants, see Current Participants.

Featured Project

Research & education networks support groundbreaking Super Hi-Vision TV broadcast

On Sept. 29, 2010, a live Super Hi-Vision TV (SHV) music broadcast was transmitted via a cooperative research & education (R&E) network platform from London, England to Tokyo, Japan. The project was conceived and led by NHK, BBC and NTT in collaboration with R&E networks as the first trial to transmit the SHV signal over advanced IP networks.

The technology, developed by Japanese public broadcaster NHK, is 16 times sharper than HDTV. Without compression, SHV would require 24 Gbps of bandwidth-significantly higher than today's standard 10Gbps network backbone paths. (Uncompressed HDTV requires approximately 1.5 Gbps of bandwidth.) The successful transmission of Sept. 29 was enabled by compression technologies developed by the NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories which reduced the transmission rate to 350Mbps.

The network platform over which the transmission occurred included the following R&E networks: JANET (United Kingdom), GEANT (a pan-European network), Internet2 (United States), and GEMnet-NTT Labs (Japan). The Pacific Wave peering facility node in Seattle, Washington provided the platform where Internet2 and GEMnet interconnected thereby allowing the efficient transmission of the compressed SHV data between their networks. The developers of this new TV technology are exploring possible use at the 2012 Olympics.

For more information, see the BBC News Technology article of Sept. 29, 2010: 'Historic' broadcast of super HD from UK to Japan

For archived featured projects, see Archives.