Abstract: Shunt fibers having a photonic bandgap cladding region including one or more hollow guiding regions of which one guiding region is configured as the core and one or more other guiding regions are configured as shunts, respectively, provide nearly single mode transmission in the core. The effective mode index of unwanted core modes and modes in one or more shunts are matched closely enough such that higher order modes will selectively couple to the shunt modes by resonant phase matching in the presence of fiber variations. The shunts are designed to have relatively higher losses thereby effectively dissipating power in the higher order modes at a faster rate.