Abstract

Because of the large installed base of conventional single-mode fibers (SMF’s) optimized at 1310 nm, there is a considerable interest in using such fibers in the 1550-nm window, where erbium-doped-fiber amplifiers (EDFA’s) provide high gains. However, at 1550 nm conventional fiber imposes a dispersion of approximately 17 ps/km, which at multigigabit-per-second rates constrains system transmission distances to values that are of limited practical interest. Although one can use external modulation or special low-chirp lasers, one solution to this problem is to use optical-fiber equalizers for dispersion compensation,¹ and to use EDFA’s for loss compensation. The practicality of this approach has recently been shown for a 1310-1550 nm WDM system,² for a 10-Gbit/s single-wavelength system,³ and for a two-wavelength system at 1550 nm.⁴

© 1993 Optical Society of America