Telecommunication networks are divided into core, metropolitan and access networks. The core and metropolitan networks use high capacity bandwidth optical fibers, while the access networks have bandwidth bottlenecks because of the use of twisted-pair wires and coaxial cable. To solve this problem and to offers the users broadband access at low cost the use of passive optical networks (PON) is proposed. A PON is formed by two basic elements, the optical network unit (ONU), positioned close to the customers and the optical line terminal (OLT), located close to the service provider. Within the available standards for PON networks, the Ethernet (EPON), standardised by the IEEE group 802.3ah, is an attractive option because it is already widely used in local networks. The multipoint control protocol (MPCP), already specified, is responsible for the media access control, providing signaling infrastructure for transmission between OLT and ONUs. However, the bandwidth allocation algorithm, that controls access based on MPCP, was considered outside the scope of the work group, permitting that this be developed by equipment providers. In this work, EPON architectures and the MPCP protocol are described and bandwidth allocation algorithms are evaluated with computational simulation. Bandwidth allocation algorithms which integrate statistical multiplexing and techniques to support for differentiated classes of service, based on time division multiplexing (TDM) scheme are investigated. Algorithms that integrate wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to the EPON TDM architecture are also investigated. The WDM-TDM algorithms permit the progressive upgrade of EPON based TDM to WDM schemes.