Abstract-This paper explores experimentally the impairments in performance that are generated when multiple single side band SCM signals are closely allocated in frequency to establish a spectrally efficient WDM link. The performance of cost effective single side band WDM/SCM implementations, without optical filters in the transmitter, presents a strong dependency on the imperfect sideband suppression ratio that can be directly achieved with the electro optical modulator. A direct detected broadband multichannel SCM link composed of a state of the art optical IQ modulator and five QPSK subcarriers per optical channel is presented, showing that a suppression ratio of 20 dB obtained directly with the modulator produced a penalty of 2 dB in overall performance, due to interference between adjacent optical channels.Index Terms-Optical IQ modulator, sideband suppression ratio (SSR), subcarrier multiplexing (SCM), wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).