While in recent years backbone bandwidth has experienced substantial growth, little has changed in the access network. “Last mile” still remains the bottleneck between a high capacity LAN or home network and the backbone. Passive optical network (PON) is a technology viewed by many as an attractive solution to this problem. In this study, we discuss and evaluate design issues for PON access networks. Specifically, to drive the cost of an access network down, it is very important to have an efficient, scalable solution. We believe that a PON based on polling, with data encapsulated in Ethernet frames, possesses the best qualities, such as dynamic bandwidth distribution, use of a single downstream and a single upstream wavelength, ability to provision a fractional wavelength capacity to each user, and ease of adding a new user. To support dynamic bandwidth distribution, we propose an interleaved polling algorithm. We then suggest a scheme for in-band signaling that allows using a single wavelength for both downstream data and control message transmission. To obtain realistic simulation results, we generated synthetic traffic that exhibits the properties of self-similarity and long-range dependence. We then analyzed the network performance and its effect on various types of traffic, e.g., best-effort data traffic, VBR video traffic and CBR streams.