This paper reports on the measurements of bit-error rate (BER) performance for a broad-band optical communications scheme that encodes the power spectrum of an erbium-doped superfluourescent fiber source with bipolar equivalent codes. The proposed scheme, like spectrum-sliced wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), suffers from the excess noise associated with the detection of a thermal-like source. BER calculations based on measured testbed characteristics and a simple model are compared with BER measurements for one and two active users. In addition, the performance of a single user in the presence of broadband spectral interference is investigated, giving a preliminary estimate of multi-user capacity. This paper discuss various solutions for increasing network capacity and performance, relevant to the proposed scheme as well as to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).

This work was sponsored by the State of Texas Advanced Technology Program and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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