  The FEC limit paradigm is the prevalent practice for designing optical
communication systems to attain a certain bit-error rate (BER) without forward
error correction (FEC). This practice assumes that there is an FEC code that
will reduce the BER after decoding to the desired level. In this paper, we
challenge this practice and show that the concept of a channel-independent FEC
limit is invalid for soft-decision bit-wise decoding. It is shown that for low
code rates and high order modulation formats, the use of the soft FEC limit
paradigm can underestimate the spectral efficiencies by up to 20%. A better
predictor for the BER after decoding is the generalized mutual information,
which is shown to give consistent post-FEC BER predictions across different
channel conditions and modulation formats. Extensive optical full-field
simulations and experiments are carried out in both the linear and nonlinear
transmission regimes to confirm the theoretical analysis.
