Systems and methods are disclosed to provide an upstream rate between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps in a cost effective manner in a 10 GEPON. In an embodiment, an optical network unit (ONU) transmitter includes a burst transceiver and a physical layer (PHY) including a high performance digital to analog converter (DAC), a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) module configured to encode end user data using a modulation scheme having more than two levels, and a laser. The ONU transmitter transmits the encoded end user data to an optical line terminal (OLT) receiver, which demodulates the data using a PAM demodulator and sends it to a service provider.