Abstract In this paper, the capabilities of chromatic dispersion compensation of a photonic crystal fiber with a hexagonal distribution of circular air holes was investigated. The vector finite element method with scattering boundary condition was used to analyze a set of configurations of the fiber in which the distance between air holes’ centers was modified. With this method it was possible to obtain the values of chromatic dispersion and confinement factor in the C fiber band. The best suited configurations were tested in a 160 km optical link with a bit rate of 40 Gbps. The performance was evaluated by measuring the bit error rate for a set of 20 channels with channel spacing of 100 GHz. The simulation results showed that is possible to reach values of chromatic dispersion as low as $- 850{{{\rm{ps}}} \over {{\rm{nm}} \middot {\rm{km}}}}$ , confinement losses close to 10 −3 dB/km and good BER results in the order of 10 −17 for a wavelength of 1550 nm.