Transmission experiments carried out during the installation of TAT 12

The introduction of optical amplifiers to long-haul submarine cable systems has provided the users and system designers with a high-quality bit rate insensitive transmission path, which can be configured in a variety of ways to achieve a required network or traffic interconnection pattern. The initial design of TAT-12 required the transmission of single 5 Gbit/s traffic streams whose error performance would meet the requirements of ITU-T Recommendation G826. In addition the system designers were required to ensure that there was sufficient ageing margin included in the overall design as well as maintain the performance of the network in the presence of other degradation mechanisms that were identified during the development of the system. The results of the transmission experiments are presented