Broadband Chirped fibre gratings allow the upgrade of the existing non-dispersion shifted fibre network to high data rate operation within the 1.55µm low-loss window. The design, fabrication, performance and application of these devices is covered. Summary: Erbium doped fibre amplifiers have effectively eliminated the propagation-loss barrier in modem telecommunication systems, providing high gain and low noise figure operation over a large (30-80nm) bandwidth 1.55µm, and have enabled high-bit-rate data transmission over transoceanic distances. However, to date the majority of the installed fibre shows a zero dispersion at ~1.3µm and exhibits a relatively high dispersion (~+17ps/nm/km with a slope of +0.07ps/nm/km) across the erbium band. This implies that the upgrade of the existing network to make full use of the erbium bandwidth by either TDM or WDM techniques, will be severely limited by the effects of linear and third order dispersion. The dispersion effects become even more adverse when combined with the optical fibre non-linearities