Patent ID: 8913890

Claim:
A method, comprising: generating a passive optical network (PON) protocol message, wherein the PON protocol message comprises an identifier of a PON user terminal and an action indication indicating that the PON user terminal intends to exercise a first power supply mode that is a power-saving mode, wherein the first power supply mode is operated at lower power than a power provided in a second power supply mode, wherein in the second power supply mode, a power supply is provided to the PON user terminal such that the PON user terminal can provide service data from an optical line termination (OLT) to a user and communicate with the OLT via an established upstream connection; sending the PON protocol message; and activating the first power supply mode in which a plurality of units of the PON user terminal comprising an optical-electrical conversion module, a PON protocol processing module and a service processing unit (SPU) are disabled to break both upstream communication and downstream communication with the OLT, while an activity detection operation on the SPU remains active.