Why compensating fibre nonlinearity will never meet capacity demands

Current research efforts are focussed on overcoming the apparent limits of communication in single mode optical fibre resulting from distortion due to fibre nonlinearity. It has been experimentally demonstrated that this Kerr nonlinearity limit is not a fundamental limit; thus it is pertinent to review where the fundamental limits of optical communications lie, and direct future research on this basis. This paper details recently presented results [1]. The work herein briefly reviews the intrinsic limits of optical communication over standard single mode optical fibre (SMF), and shows that the empirical limits of silica fibre power handling and transceiver design both introduce a practical upper bound to the capacity of communication using SMF, on the order of 1 Pbit/s. Transmission rates exceeding 1 Pbit/s are shown to be possible, however, with currently available optical fibres, attempts to transmit beyond this rate by simply increasing optical power will lead to an asymptotically zero fractional increase in capacity.