Patent ID: 8139605

Claim:
An optical network terminal that terminates a fiber link of an optical network that conforms to a gigabit passive optical network (GPON) standard, the optical network terminal comprising: a single GPON media access control (MAC) unit that converts physical layer signals received over the optical network into data, wherein the data is received over the optical network via an asynchronous transport mode (ATM) transport or an Ethernet transport, wherein the single GPON MAC unit supports multiple layer two (L2) transports including the ATM transport and the Ethernet transport, and wherein the data comprises ATM cells or Ethernet packets; an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) transport engine that converts the ATM cells into a digital representation of a T1 service in accordance with an ATM adaption layer (AAL) for one or more subscriber devices when the data is received over the optical network via the ATM transport; and an Ethernet transport engine that converts the Ethernet packets into the digital representation of the T1 service in accordance with a pseudo-wire emulation edge-to-edge (PWE3) protocol for the one or more subscriber devices when the data is received over the optical network via the Ethernet transport, wherein the optical network terminal is selectively configurable to select one of the ATM transport engine and the Ethernet transport engine to convert the data into the digital representation of the T1 service for the one or more subscriber devices.