One embodiment of the present invention provides an optical line terminal (OLT) in an Ethernet passive optical network (EPON). The OLT includes a number of bi-directional optical transceivers. At least one bi-directional optical transceiver is coupled to an optical network unit (ONU) group that includes a number of ONUs. The OLT further includes a first downstream media access control (MAC) interface configured to provide a first downstream control signal and a splitter configured to split the first downstream control signal to a number of sub-signals. At least one sub-signal is configured to control downstream transmission of a corresponding bi-directional optical transceiver to a corresponding ONU-group.