Transmission fibers with reduced loss and minimized nonlinear effects as well as advanced optical amplifiers are key components for future optical communication networks. Nonlinear coupling between neighboring wavelength channels leads to stochastic distortion. These distortions reduce performance drastically and cannot be compensated by digital signal processing. On the other hand, low fiber loss is essential to enable optimum optical signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver and long-haul transmission. Furthermore, advances in optical amplifiers with large bandwidth and improved noise performance help to increase both reach and capacity.

In this JOCN article, Zhu and co-workers present two transmission experiments that take advantage of a fiber with low loss and large effective area. An arrayed erbium-doped fiber amplifier for application in reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers is introduced offering the opportunity of shared pump power and compact size. The authors also describe a wideband fiber-based amplifier that combines an erbium-doped fiber amplifier and a Raman amplifier to support a 70nm-wide wavelength range without any guard band. In an experiment with 34.6 Tb/s transmission over 2400 km the ultra-broadband amplifier is demonstrated together with the low loss, high effective-area fiber. The authors point out the essential role of new optimized fibers and advanced amplifier technologies for a further increase of transport capacity of optical transmission systems as required due to ever increasing traffic demand. Besides the use of high performance signal processing and advanced multilevel modulation, both the fiber and amplifier concepts presented here will be key elements in future systems.

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