We apply IEEE 802.3 frame burst mode (FBM) to the Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) downstream link and compare its performance with non-frame burst mode for various traffic patterns. Although in light traffic loads (p<0.5) the efficiency of the FBM mechanism is not significant, it does feature high throughput, small jitter, low queue occupancy, and short queuing delay in optical line terminals under various traffic loads with various numbers of optical network units (ONUs). The FBM performance always approaches that of full-duplex mode, especially under heavy traffic loads (p>0.5). Moreover, an increase in number of ONUs will decrease the burst performance. Our work shows that FBM scheme is very useful for EPON transmission and has low design complexity.