optical and electrical compensation techniques that apply optical signal processing within an optical PMD compensator (PMDC) unit or post-detection electronic signal processing of the photodiode signal by an electronic equalizer within the receiver.In this paper, we review the advances in optical and electronic technologies for PMD mitigation. We first briefly analyze the impact of installed fiber PMD on a transmission system and how to quantify it. The principle and structure of optical PMDCs are described next. The impact of modulation formats on the design of optical PMDCs as well as the performance of a twostage optical PMDC for 40 Gb/s non-return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (NRZ-DPSK) will be discussed. We follow with a discussion of electronic equalizers, which process the electrical signal provided