Abstract

Recently, we reported¹ that, depending on fiber design, the upper limit of factory measured cutoff wavelength could be comfortably set anywhere from 20 to 60 nm above the system operating wavelength without incurring signal degradation due to modal noise. For these calculations we used certain worst-case system parameters and the model of Duff et al.² to estimate the modal noise effects on system performance. We report on an experimental evaluation of these effects for a 1.2-Gb/s system and directly compare these results with the limits to cutoff wavelength determined in Ref. 1. In this way, we provide a clear demonstration of the dependence of modal noise on both cutoff wavelength and splice loss.

© 1987 Optical Society of America