High-speed data transmission over a 1 km broad wavelength window multimode fiber.

For cost and design simplicity, various optical network architectures have been proposed in which downstream traffic from the optical line terminal to the optical networking unit is transmitted by carriers in the 1550 nm window, and upstream traffic by those in the 1300 nm window. A new generation of multimode fiber (MMF) has been designed to accommodate this requirement and to address technical challenges associated with fiber coupling. By restricting the number of modes at both fiber input and output, using off-the-shelf single-mode transceivers, single-wavelength 40 Gbit/s data transmission over a 1 km broad wavelength window multimode fiber has been demonstrated with only a 1.5 dB power penalty. The capacity in this new class of MMF is expected to increase with conventional technologies in single-mode fiber such as wavelength-division multiplexing and polarization multiplexing.