Ethernet is offering a lot of advantages for the PON, what was the motivation for creating EPON. Ethernet is the most popular solution for WANs, LANs, and MANs. Due to features like low cost Ethernet UNI, ability to carry different sizes of traffic packets, and use of MAC address for switching it became on of the most popular choices for PON network.

Originally EPON was providing symmetric line rate of 1.250 Gbps and using Ethernet frames as transmission data. EPON was and is using following wavelengths:

• between 1480 and 1580 nm downstream

• between 1260 and 1360 nm upstream

Later new enhanced version of EPON was developed  – the 10G EPON. It achieved better reliability, energy efficiency, and transmission speed. It gives data rate of 10 Gbps downstream and either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps upstream. Although new version is enhanced it is still backwards compatible.

Main reason for the 10G EPON enhancement is the demand of digital video services. Multiple high-definition video streams can be transmitted to each ONU with the data rate of 10 Gbps. The amount of customers in the network can be more than 32 due to splitter capabilities. Following services and applications are supported by 10G EPON:

• HDTV

• IPTV

• VoD (Video on Demand)

• 3D video games

• Ultra-high-speed Internet

• Personal video streaming

• Business Ethernet access

• Medical imaging

• Distributed network attached storage

   

Eventually the 10G EPON interface to cost ratio would be higher than the one of 1G EPON.