Abstract

Recently, it was demonstrated that erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) can be used as a novel traveling wave type optical amplifier in optical communication systems.^1-3 In this paper, 375 km at 10-Gbit/s and 523 km at 5-Gbit/s transmission experiments with multiple linear optical repeaters are demonstrated. The repeaters are effective for long span transmission because erbium doped fiber amplifiers have a higher gain of ~20 dB than 10-dB semiconductor laser amplifiers.⁴ This new record bit-rate regenerative-distance product of 3.75 Tbit/s km obtained by using fiber in-line amplifiers is a substantial improvement over the previous 2.16 Tbit/s km.⁵

© 1990 Optical Society of America