Fiber nonlinearity and dispersion mitigation in 40-Gb/s NRZ WDM transmission using a multichannel optical equalizer

We investigate the mitigation of distortion due to self-phase modulation and dispersion in 40-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero wavelength-division-multiplexed transmission using a multichannel optical equalizer. The ability of the equalizer to reduce the signal degradation due to fiber nonlinearities was demonstrated. We achieved 21-channel transmission at BER <10/sup -9/ without forward error correction over 750 km of true wave reduced slope fiber with 107-km amplifier span lengths.