Transmission of 7ps RZ data over 141km of installed fibre using an all-fibre polarisation-independent phase conjugator incorporating noise reduction

We demonstrate MSSI transmission of 7 ps RZ data over 141 km of installed standard fibre using a novel polarisation-independent all-fibre phase conjugator pumped by orthogonally polarised fibre DFB lasers. A system noise performance is analysed and noise suppressing fibre grating is incorporated to improve conjugator performance considerably. With this new practical conjugator design, a power penalty of < 0.7 dB compared to back-to-back is achieved at 10 Gbit/s with negligible polarisation penalty. This new conjugator is thus highly suitable for deployment in real system upgrade