Limitation to WDM transmission distance due to cross-phase modulation induced spectral broadening in dispersion compensated standard fiber systems

We describe large spectral broadening due to the interaction of cross-phase modulation/self-phase modulation and fiber dispersion, and explain its contribution to the penalties in standard fiber systems pre- and postcompensated by dispersion compensating fiber. To our knowledge, this is the first measurement of this effect in a dense WDM transmission system at 10 Gb/s with this dispersion management scheme and good agreement is reported with the numerical modeling results.