Practical design issues for TDM transmission systems beyond 10 Gbit/s

The authors describe how the interaction of source chirp and fibre nonlinearity with fibre chromatic dispersion affects the practical design of medium-haul TDM systems with bit rates of 20 and 40 Gbit/s for various fibre types. 40 Gbit/s transmission over standard single mode fibre is predicted for route lengths of up to 300 km using a return-to-zero data format and fine-tuning of the link dispersion at the receiver end.