100km reach DWDM SuperPON with upstream bit rates of 2.5Gb/s and 10Gb/s

The potential for sharing infrastructure costs between a large number of customers and the high data rates allowed by optical fibres make passive optical networks (PONs) an attractive solution to the problem of upgrading current copper-based access networks. Optically-amplified, long reach, time division multiple access (TDMA) PONs or 'SuperPONs'^1-4 offer the potential to further reduce bandwidth transport costs by enabling the direct connection of access networks and inner core networks, thereby eliminating the costs of the outer core/metro backhaul network. The use of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) could also allow sharing the same feeder fibre and PON head end equipment between a number of such TDMA SuperPONs, each working at different ITU-grid wavelengths. However, a cost effective access solution should employ a customer optical network unit (ONU), which is independent of the PON wavelength, or colorless, in order to reduce the high inventory and deployment costs of using expensive, wavelength-specified sources at the customer. In this paper we demonstrate for the first time the use of a monolithically-integrated, electroabsorption modulator-semiconductor optical amplifiers (EAM-SOAs) as a colorless ONU in a high performance DWDM SuperPON system. These compact devices offer the potential for low-cost optoelectronic integration with other ONU components together with the ability to modulate at rates up to 10 Gbps and beyond. We have used this approach to investigate the feasibility of supporting up to 17 SuperPONs from a single feeder fibre and PON head end, each of 100 km-reach accommodating 512 users at 2.5 Gb/s or 128 at 10 Gb/s.