The need for more bandwidth in communications has stimulated the search for new fiberizable materials with properties superior to fused silica which is the current state-of-the-art. One of the key properties is Raman gain by which a pump beam amplifies a signal beam of longer wavelength. An apparatus capable of directly measuring the spectral dependence and absolute magnitude of the material Raman gain coefficient using nonlinear optics techniques has been built. Using radiation from a 1064 nm Nd:YAG laser as the pump and from a tunable Optical Parametric Generator and Amplifier as the signal, the Raman gain spectrum was measured for different families of glass samples with millimeter thickness. A number of glass families were investigated. Tellurites with added oxides of tungsten, niobium, and thallium produced the largest Raman gain coefficients of any oxide family reported to date, typically 30-50 times higher than that of fused silica. On the other hand, phosphate families were found with spectrally broad Raman gain response, 5 times broader than fused silica and flat to [plus or minus] dB over the full spectral range in some compositions. Although the chalcogenides were found to photodamage easily, coefficients 50 - 80 times that of fused silica were measured. Finally, a numerical study was undertaken to predict the theoretical performance and noise properties of tellurite fibers for communications. Included in the computer modeling were linear loss; the interaction among multiple pumps and signals; forward and/or backward propagating pump beams; forward, backward and double Rayleigh scattering; noise properties of amplifiers; excess noise, etc. This led to a comparison of the optical signal-to-noise characteristics for Raman gain in a tellurite versus a silica fiber.