terminal; in the latter case, the loss and nonlinearity associated with dispersion
compensation also contribute to system reach. Submarine systems have tradi-
tionally been built from spans in which both positive and negative dispersion
fibers were cabled. A span comprising a positive and a negative dispersion fiber
with equal RDS—both fibers being cabled—is known as a dispersion-managed
fiber (DMF) span. DMF spans were first deployed in a 10-Gbps trans-Pacific
submarine fiber link [9], requiring extremely precise dispersion compensation
over 96 channels. The positive dispersion fiber was a super large area (SLA) fiber
with dispersion þ20 ps/nm-km and A
eff
¼ 107 mm
2
, while the negative dispersion
fiber was an inverse dispersion fiber (IDF) with dispersion ...