10-Gb/s transmission of 1.55-μm directly modulated signal over 100 km of negative dispersion fiber

The largest transmission distance (100 km) ever reported for a commercially available 10-Gb/s 1.55-μm directly modulated signal over a single fiber link without using any dispersion compensation is demonstrated. The achieved dispersion-length product for a Q-factor greater than 9.4 dB (bit-error rate less than 10/sup -15/) was about 750 ps/nm. The fiber that enabled such long transmission distance with high dispersion tolerance is a nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber that has negative dispersion in the entire usable bandwidth (1280-1620 nm) and is optimized for operation with directly modulated lasers. The excellent single-channel transmission performance that we achieved can be expected also from wavelength-division-multiplexed systems with channels across the erbium-doped fiber amplifier bands.