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 ,, \times ,, 100 Gb/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 \mu text{m}^{2} , 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 \sim 1.5 dB back-to-back optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty at pre forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) threshold ( 3.8\times 10^{-2} ), with respect to theoretical performance. In particular, we demonstrate \sim 6500 km transmission across the entire C-band, at pre-FEC BER of 3.8\times 10^{-2} , employing EDFA + backward Raman amplification—where the central channel (1552.2nm) had sufficient margin to enable transmission of up to \sim 8000 km. Furthermore, we report that hybrid amplification enables up to \sim 60 % improvement in maximum transmission reach, compared to EDFA based links. To the best of our knowledge, a record capacity-distance product of \sim 62.4~text\rm {Pb}/text\rm {s}\cdot text\rm {km- is achieved for NZ-DSF—an 11-fold increase, compared with the previous literature.