A fiber optic link is provided that uses a relatively low-cost transceiver that incorporates relatively inexpensive low bandwidth optical and electrical components to achieve high data rate operations. The data rate of the fiber optic link can be greater than the data rate of the laser of the transceiver provided the laser meets certain noise requirements; in particular, the relative intensity noise (RIN) of the laser must be low enough to ensure low bit error rate (BER) operation of the link.