A novel scheme to realize multirate optical codedivision multipleaccess system (OCDMA) is proposed, with which the OCDMA system can transmit signals with different data rates and quality at the same time. The bits error ratio (BER) of the system is analyzed theoretically, and the probability to improve the performance by using the hardwarelimit is evaluated. Taking a system with two different rate signals as an example, the BERs of the proposed scheme and the multirate multilength OCDMA are simulated and compared. The results show that, with the rise of transmission rate, the former system obtained a better general performance than the latter, though there appears a slight decline for the performance of the address code words for it. Finally, relevant experiments are done to verify the performance of the code and the probability of multirate OCDMA.