Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entanglement is a criterion that is more demanding than just certifying entanglement. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the low-resource generation of bipartite continuous-variable entanglement, as realized by mixing a squeezed mode with a vacuum mode at a balanced beam splitter, i.e., the generation of so-called vacuum-class entanglement. We find that in order to observe EPR entanglement the total optical loss must be smaller than 33.3 %. However, arbitrarily strong EPR entanglement is generally possible with this scheme. We realize continuous-wave squeezed light at 1550 nm with up to 9.9 dB of nonclassical noise reduction, which is the highest value at a telecom wavelength so far. Using two phase-controlled balanced homodyne detectors we observe an EPR covariance product of 0.502±0.006<1, where 1 is the critical value. We discuss the feasibility of strong Gaussian entanglement and its application for quantum key distribution in a short-distance fiber network.