Feature Issue on Passive Optical Network Architectures and TechnologiesService providers continuously stress the growing requirement for faster, cheaper, and more reliable deployment of broadband networks, forcing hardware manufacturers to respond by pursuing innovative, revolutionary solutions and driving down component complexity, installation time, installation skill level required, and, ultimately, the overall cost of deploying the said networks in the field. The current dramatic increase in the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment pace, along with the general desire to eventually migrate completely to these systems, puts the passive optical network (PON) deployment issues in the spotlight of current academic and system vendor research. We argue that even though PON systems are considered a low-cost solution for deploying broadband services, there is still an approximately 8% optimization margin, and thus handmade network structures should be subject to a straightforward though untrivial optimization process, resulting in an overall network deployment cost reduction of up to 8%, thereby leading to highly cost-efficient structures.