Multi-terabit lightwave system for the new millennium

For many years, it has been clear that traffic demands from service providers would lead to the capacity of multi-terabit/second in the year 2000. Independently, this could be seen from historical optical fiber capacity research experiments and product trends. Numerous inventions have occurred to achieve extremely high capacity dense WDM systems. The dimensions of closer optical channel spacing, higher bit rates per channel, and longer unregenerated distances have all been expanded. In particular, large numbers of both 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s channels have been transmitted through significant distances. This article describes the technologies required and the impairments faced when transmitting multi-terabit per second signals over long distances. Methods to mitigate these impairments are also described.