as much less, due to the decrease in prices. In the technical field, from 1990 to 2002, the long-haul capacity increased by a factor of 1000, while the access capacity remained almost constant (at least for the great majority of the users still having a kbit/s standard phone line). This huge increase in the long-haul capacity was paid by an increase of about a factor 4 in the carrier capital expenditure (CAPEX), and by an even higher increase in the network operational expenditures (OPEX). All this capital was not injected in the market by end users, whose individual expenditure for telecommunication services was not increased (and in many cases was even decreased due to the price behavior), but by financial players that were hoping to exploit the financial gain driven by a fast-growing market. In the absence of a relevant capital injection into the market from end customers, this situation was destined to be only temporary. In a few years, the debt of the telecommu- nication carriers was SO big to prevent them from continuing their investment policy. The carrier CAPEX had a sudden collapse (see Figure 2.2), and a great crisis struck the market. This was a structural crisis, deeply anchored to the way the market developed. The only possible solution was to induce the end customers to inject more money into the market to sustain its growth. The key of this strategy was individuated in the introduction of new telecommunication services SO as to drive an average revenue per customer (ARPU) increase. In order to do that, it was needed to increase the capacity of the customer access line. For this reason, after the end of the telecommunication bubble, all the major European and U.S. carriers started a wide renewal of the access network in order to provide more bandwidth to the end user as a support to a new generation of telecommunication services. Renewing the access network is perhaps the most CAPEX-intensive operation a carrier can undertake, due to the extreme geographical spread of this part of the network, which