Patent ID: 7941559

Claim:
In a fiber to the home (FTTH) system including a central office that interfaces a packet data network with a passive optical network (PON), a media access control (MAC) layer address translation system, comprising: a home network unit (HNU) coupled to the PON and having an associated base MAC layer address and an associated secondary MAC layer address that identify the HNU within the PON; a host system coupled in a network to the HNU and having an associated host MAC layer address that identifies the host system within the network; and a MAC address table stored in a memory device that associates the host MAC layer address with the secondary MAC layer address; wherein upon receiving an outgoing transmission from the host system that includes the host MAC layer address, the HNU accesses the MAC address table to determine the secondary MAC layer address that is associated with the host MAC layer address and modifies the outgoing transmission to replace the host MAC layer address with the secondary MAC layer address.