In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL)-based si-multaneous 45.2 Gbit/s (2×22.6 Gbit/s) 4-PAM data and 8 GHz (2×4 GHz) phase modulated reference frequency (RF) clock signal transmission dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system for optical interconnects. Two low-cost power-efficient 10 G VCSEL channels with central wavelengths at 1 550.71 nm and 1 551.11 nm are sepa-rately modulated with 22.6 Gbit/s 4-PAM data, therefore doubling the channel bit rate. Carrier spectral efficiency per channel is further maximized by exploiting the phase attribute in transmission of a 4 Hz RF clock signal. To further maximize the network capacity, the two VCSEL channels are densely multiplexed at 0.4 nm spacing. We therefore experimentally achieve the network data rate of 45.2 Gbit/s with 8 GHz phase modulated RF clock signal. The results show that receiver sensitivities of .11.02 dBm and .9.98 dBm are experimentally achieved for VCSEL channels of 1 550.71 nm and 1 551.11 nm respectively without the phase modulated RF clock signal. However, the introduction of a phase modulated clock signal contributes to a maximum interference penalty of 0.57 dBm and 0.41 dBm for the con-sidered channels respectively. Simultaneous distribution of transmission data and reference clock signal over shared network structure maximizes the carrier spectral efficiency and network capacity with low cost.