According to the CFI materials, representatives from the following companies supported the formation of the study group:[2] Advance/Newhouse Communications, Aeluros, Agilent, Allied Telesyn, Alloptic, Ample Communications, Astar-ODSM, Broadcom, Centillium Communications, China Netcom, China Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco Systems, ClariPhy Communications, Conexant Systems, Corecess, Corning, Delta Electronics, ETRI, Fiberxon, FOTEK Optoelectronics, ImmenStar, Infinera, ITRI, KDDI R&D Labs., K-Opticom, Korea Telecom, NEC, OpNext, Picolight, Quake Technologies, Salira Systems, Samsung Electronics, Softbank BB, Teknovus, Teranetics, Texas Instruments, Telecom Malaysia, TranSwitch, UNH-IOL, UTStarcom, Vitesse.
[4] Major milestones: The work on the 10G-EPON was continued by the IEEE P802.3bk Extended EPON Task Force,[5] formed in March 2012.
The major goals for this Task Force included adding support for PX30, PX40, PRX40, and PR40 power budget classes to both 1G-EPON and 10G-EPON.
The main driver for 10/10G-EPON was to provide adequate downstream and upstream bandwidth to support multi-family residential building (known in the standard as Multi Dwelling Unit or MDU) customers.
When deployed in the MDU configuration, one EPON Optical Network Unit (ONU) may be connected to up to a thousand subscribers.
For example, such functions as 64B/66B line coding, self-synchronizing scrambler, or gearbox are also used in optical fiber types of 10 Gigabit Ethernet links.
Like all EPON networks, 10G-EPON transmits data in variable-length packets up to 1518 bytes, as specified in the IEEE 802.3 standard.
These variable-length packets are better suited to IP traffic than the fixed-length, 53-byte cells used by other Passive Optical Networks, such as GPON.
The 802.3av standard places significant emphasis on enabling simultaneous operation of 1 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s EPON systems on the same outside plant.