John S. Abbott

Evaluation of extended reach capability of 40G BiDi VCSEL-based WDM transmission over OM4 multimode fibers

40G BiDi is a commercial WDM transceiver with duplex LC connectivity for transmissions over multimode fibers. In this paper, we evaluate the transmission performance of 40G BiDi over OM4 fibers. We have carefully selected OM4 fibers with the lowest and highest peak wavelengths around 850 nm to evaluate the reach capability for 40G BiDi transmission. We demonstrated that the OM4 fiber with the lowest peak wavelength can transmit error free over 325 m while the OM4 fiber with the highest peak wavelength can transmit up to 350-390 m. In both cases, the maximum lengths are much longer than 150 m and 200 m specified for OM4 and wideband MMF transmissions, respectively. We also measured the transceiver encircled flux and found that it was tighter than the encircled flux standard, which may be a factor favoring long system reach at 900 nm.