Surface Normal Electro-Absorption Modulators as Colorless Upstream Transmitters in a WDM Passive Optical Network

We demonstrate a WDM passive optical network that uses high-speed, polarization-independent surface normal modulators as upstream 25-Gb/s transmitters. A comb source located at the optical line terminal establishes the upstream wavelengths. Discrete multitone modulation is used to mitigate Rayleigh backscattering interference in our single-fiber architecture