Transport performance of a transparent WDM regional area ring network utilizing optimized components/fiber

We present excellent performance results (Q-factor>10) for a transparent regional-size ring network based on application-optimized optical layer components and fiber. The network consists of 6 nodes interconnected with 86.5 km-spans of uncompensated negative dispersion fiber (520 km-ring circumference n no dispersion compensation) and supports 32 directly modulated channels operating at 2.5 Gb/s (80 Gb/s capacity).