Abstract

The use of dispersion management has increased the possibility of transmitting information at higher data rates over standard fibre [1]-[6]. Standard fibre makes up the majority of fibre currently installed in the ground however it has low dispersion at 1.3µm whereas current systems operate at 1.5µm where the Erbium doped fibre amplifier can be utilised. The installed fibre has dispersion of between 16.0 and 17.0ps/nm/km at 1.5µm which means that systems operating at this wavelength are susceptible to high Gordon-Haus jitter [7] and soliton interactions [8], also the average powers required to transmit conventional solitons at 40Gbit/s over this fibre would be more than 200mW. It has previously been shown that it is possible to transmit soliton pulses at data rates of 10Gbit/s over transoceanic distances in standard fibre through the use of dispersion management [2, 3]. In this paper we show that it is possible to use similar techniques to transmit data at 40Gbit/s over more than 2000km of standard fibre.

© 1998 Optical Society of America