High-capacity lightwave transmission experiments

In recent years the demonstrated transmission capacity of single-mode fibers has increased at over 4 dB per year. This progress has led to numerous systems experiments with capacities of 1 Tb/s and higher. Commerical systems have experienced similar capacity growth rates with Lucent's WaveStar™ 400G system providing up to 400-Gb/s capacity per fiber pair. This paper describes the innovations that directly led to terabit/s systems experiments and is an extension of a recently published paper.