Solitons for breaking barriers to terabit/second WDM and OTDM transmission in the next millennium

If an optical pulse has a self-waveform-stabilization effect, it would be very useful for high-speed communication and signal processing. An optical soliton governed by the nonlinear Schrodinger equation is such a pulse, as it balances the group velocity dispersion with the fiber nonlinearity self-phase modulation. We describe progress on ultrahigh-speed optical communication in the time (TDM) and frequency domains (WDM) using soliton effects. Especially, we describe 1-Tb/s WDM soliton transmission and 1.28-Tb/s optical TDM (OTDM) linear transmission, in which the soliton effects play important roles in making the experiment successful. These techniques help pave the path for optical technology of the next century.