The use of optical fiber is of great interest in developing extensive, high-speed networking infrastructures. Optical fiber provide many advantages over traditional copper cables and wireless links. Among them are high security, low electromagnetic interference, extremely low loss and high bandwidths, light weight and manageability. However, the very small wavelengths associated with optical radiation requires very small waveguide dimensions. Waveguide dimension of single mode fiber (SMF) are < 10µm, resulting in relatively poor yield in device manufacturing. For residential and other last-mile networks topologies, cost constraints limit the appeal of SMF. Multimode fiber (MMF) allow for less restrictive manufacturing tolerances; however, the distortion that results from the dispersion in propagation among the many modes can be prohibitively large for data rates approaching and exceeding 1 Gb/s. To improve the deployability of MMF, a method of dispersion compensation that maintains the ease-of-use characteristic of MMF is required This dissertation demonstrates an opto-electronic method of dispersion compensation by the use of a multisegment photodetector. It is shown the modes of the fiber can be seperated such that when the individual photodetector signals are combined, the resulting temporal response of the fiber link is improved from that of a conventional fiber link. This method is extremely robust to system variation and is independent of data rate and transmission format, allowing it to be employed in a wide variety of optical links. More importantly, the implementation demonstrated is comparable, in simplicity and alignment tolerance, to a conventional photodetector. System performance is shown using both temporal and frequency response as well as real bit error rate and eye diagram measurements.