Fiber feeders have been proposed for simplifying the base station in microcells, and thus make feasible the use of the microcellular architecture to overcome the barrier posed by the finite available spectra. We provide an analytical model to evaluate the exact error performance of the system, which accounts for the statistical effects in the mobile channel and the nonlinearity of the laser diode. The nonlinearity of the optical source coupled with the fading nature of the wireless channel mandates a solution based on simulation. However, the computer run time for the simulation is prohibitive, virtually rendering the model useless. We propose a computer-amenable "simplified model" which reduces the computation time immensely and also provides reasonably tight bounds. The BER performance for various channel conditions is evaluated using both models, and comparative studies are made on fiber-optic and non-fiber-optic systems. The tradeoff between the system performance and system capacity is discussed. Results obtained justify the use of fiber-optic feeders for future microcellular systems from a BER-performance point of view.