Abstract. A four-channel soliton system design is described that repre-sents an improvement on a previous study Opt. Express , 2007 . In thatstudy, a bit-rate-length BL product in excess of 2.0 1510 baud/kmfrom a dense-dispersion-managed DDM dual-soliton system wasachieved through numerical experimentation. Similar to the dual-solitondesign, a combination of polarization multiplexing and wavelength-division multiplexing is employed. Numerical experiments with four soli-ton channels, each carrying 80 Gb/s, are carried out over 10,000 km.Assystem parameters are optimized, the Q =6 threshold distance attainedis 9150 km, yielding a BL product of 2.9 1510 baud/km. © 2008 Society ofPhoto-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. DOI: 10.1117/1.3027480 Subject terms: soliton; dispersion management; polarization multiplexing;wavelength-division multiplexing . Paper 080241R received Apr. 30, 2008; revised manuscript received Aug. 21,2008; accepted for publication Sep. 23, 2008; published online Dec. 1, 2008.