At the height of the recent telecom boom, schemes abounded for ways to fulfill the perceived need for an all-optical, ultra long-haul fiber optic network. Although most died when the boom went bust, at least one, based on dispersion-managed solitons in an all-Raman amplified system, is now beginning to gain significant commercial success. That system, Lucent Technology's "LambdaXtreme", very conservatively claims unrepeatered distances of 4000 km in Wavelength Division Multiplexed transmission of 100 or more channels at 10 Gbit/s each. As impressive as that performance may seem, however, its distance is still limited by a serious non-linear defect, viz., a jitter in pulse arrival times resulting from inter-channel soliton-soliton collisions. In this talk, I shall show how a recently invented technique, based on the use of "periodic-group-delay" devices for an optimal fraction of the dispersion compensation, has enabled experimental demonstration of LambdaXtreme-like, dense WDM transmission to nearly 20,000 km, or essentially the distance imposed by the limiting effects of amplifier spontaneous emission noise alone.