9.6Tb/s CP-QPSK Transmission Over 6500 km of NZ-DSF With Commercial Hybrid Amplifiers

We experimentally demonstrate, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, an ultralong-haul dense wavelength division multiplexed transmission of 96 × 100Gb/s coherent polarization multiplexed quadrature phase-shifted keying transponders over ITU-T G.655 nonzero dispersion-shifted large effective area fibers (NZ-DSF) with an effective core area of 72 μm², employing both commercial erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) and hybrid EDFA + Raman amplification systems. Using the state-of-the-art digital pulse shaping and digital preemphasis algorithms, we report ~1.5dB back-toback optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty at pre forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) threshold (3.8 × 10^-2), with respect to theoretical performance. In particular, we demonstrate ~6500km transmission across the entire C-band, at pre-FEC BER of 3.8 × 10^-2, employing EDFA + backward Raman amplification-where the central channel (1552.2nm) had sufficient margin to enable transmission of up to ~8000km. Furthermore, we report that hybrid amplification enables up to ~60% improvement in maximum transmission reach, compared to EDFA based links. To the best of our knowledge, a record capacity-distance product of ~62.4 Pb/s·km is achieved for NZ-DSF-an 11-fold increase, compared with the previous literature.