A soliton transmitter using a CW laser and an NRZ driven Mach-Zehnder modulator

We demonstrate a practical soliton transmitter in which optical pulses are simultaneously generated and encoded in a single external modulator driven by a nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) waveform. The soliton system performance of this transmitter compares favorably with more commonly used soliton transmitters while at the same time being less complex. The transmitter was capable of sending pseudorandom data at 2.5 Gb/s through 12 000 km of fiber with a bit error of 10/sup -10/ in a system without frequency-guiding filters.