In this paper, the downstream transmission performance of two types of 8QAM-OFDM optical signals in broadband optical access system has been analyzed. After modulation and coding, two types of 10 Gbit/s 8QAM-OFDM optical access signals are downstream transmitted over 1 km, 10 km, 20 km and 40 km single mode fibers (SMFs) and received successfully. Different transmission distances impact on the bit error rate (BER) of the received signal is analyzed by simulation, while the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 20 dB. The results show that, while the transmission distance is shorter than 10 km, the BER values of two types of 8QAM-OFDM optical signals are smaller than 10 −10. As the above optical access signals are transmitted over 40 km SMF, the BER value of the first type of 8QAM-OFDM signals is bigger than 10 −6 , and the BER of the other type of 8QAM-OFDM signals is smaller than 10 −6 .