Abstract

Most of the installed fibre systems are based on standard single mode fibres operating at the low loss window around 1.55 µm. Such optical fibre system with zero dispersion at 1.3 µm suffers from severe limitation due to chromatic dispersion, for example, the limited transmission distance of a 10 Gbit/s fibre system is about 65 km [1]. Much effort has been given to overcome the dispersion limitation, thus upgrading the existing fibre system and increasing the repeaterless transmission distance. Techniques using dispersion compensating fibres and mid-system spectral inversion have been shown to extend the dispersion limited transmission distance greatly [2, 3]. A duobinary signalling scheme has also been investigated [4, 5], which increases the transmission distance of a 10 Gbit/s system to beyond 100 km by reducing the signal bandwidth. In comparison dispersion compensation in the electrical part of the optical link is expected to provide relatively simple and more flexible ways to tackle the chromatic dispersion [6].

© 1996 Optical Society of America