Crosstalk characteristics of a 100 km-long splicedpolarisation-maintaining optical fibre

Crosstalk of -10.1 dB in a 100 km-long spliced polarisation-maintaining optical fibre has been achieved at 1.56 μm wavelength. The fibre has been constructed from 14 125 μm-diameter PANDA fibres, with an average modal birefringence of 4.8×10^-4 , by conventional arc-fusion splice techniques. An average transmission loss of 0.37 dB/km, including the splice loss, has been obtained at 1.56 μm wavelength