At a receiver a 20 Gbit/s soliton bit stream (20) is demultiplexed into two 10 Gbit/s bit streams (22a, 22b) using a 2-way splitter (6), a clock extraction circuit (4), and a pair of polarization insensitive amplitude modulators (8a, 8b) exhibiting positive chirp. The outputs of the modulators are fed to detectors (7a, 7b) via lengths (9a, 9b) of optical fiber exhibiting normal dispersion thereby producing bit streams (23a, 23b) with increased mark/space ratio and reduced timing jitter.