We report on the 320 Gb/s (40 Gb/s x 8 channels) WDM transmission experiment using short-period dispersion-managed fiber. After 320-km transmission, the average Q-factor was measured to be better than 20.4 dB. In addition, we compared the performances of various types of fibers in 40-Gb/s based systems. The results show that the SPDMF was robust to both the intra-channel and inter-channel nonlinearities due to its small average dispersion and large local dispersion. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.