Close to 100 Gbps discrete multitone transmission over 100m of multimode fiber using a single transverse mode 850nm VCSEL

Discrete Multitone Transmission (DMT) transmission over standard multimode fiber (MMF) using high-speed single (SM) and multimode (MM) Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) is studied. Transmission speed in the range of 72Gbps to 82Gbps over 300m -100m distances of OM4 fiber is realized, respectively, at Bit-Error-Ratio (BER) <5e-3 and the received optical power of only -5dBm. Such BER condition requires only 7% overhead for the conversion to error-free operation using single Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem forward error correction (BCH-FEC) coding and decoding. SM VCSEL is demonstrated to provide a much higher data transmission capacity over MMF. For 100m MMF transmission SM VCSEL allows 82Gbps as compared to MM VCSEL resulting in only 34Gbps at the same power (-5dBm). Furthermore, MM VCSEL link at 0dBm is still restricted at 100m distance by 63Gbps while SM VCSEL can exceed 100Gbps at such power levels. We believe that with further improvement in SM VCSELs and fiber coupling >100Gbps data transmission over >300m MMF distances at the BER levels matching the industry standards will become possible.