Fibre transmission of 10 Gbit/s signals following wavelength conversion using a travelling-wave semiconductor optical amplifier

The wavelength of an intensity-modulated signal at 10 Gbit/s was translated from 1546 to 1531 nm using cross gain-compression in a semiconductor optical amplifier. The shifted signal was transmitted with less than 1 dB penalty over a 121 km span of dispersion-shifted fibre with two in-line amplifiers. A dispersion penalty of nearly 2 dB is measured for transmission of 6 Gbit/s data over 20 km conventional fibre.