Long distance communications with solitons

A theoretical review of the use of optical solitons in fibres for high speed communication is presented with emphasis on recent progress in soliton control. An optical soliton is a pulse of light in a fibre produced by a balance of group velocity dispersion and cubic non-linearity. Twenty years after its discovery, optical solitons are rapidly attracting interest from technical as well as scientific communities thanks to progress in coherent light source, fibre amplifier and other photonic devices and surprising agreement of the theoretical predictions with experimental observations.