With increasing usage of the Internet, energy consumption of network equipment has become a crucial challenge from both an economic and an environmental point of view. This paper combines users’ behavior of accessing the network with energy saving algorithms for energy-aware network equipment, and investigates potential energy savings in the access network. The study is based on a set of traffic data that collected from a real residential fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network during three continuous months in 2013. The results show that on average every household link in the access network can potentially save at least 18% energy consumption with sleep-mode enabled equipment.