ication equipment vendors. The growth of the telecommunication market in the Far East was characterized by great speed during the period in which the crisis was hitting harder in Europe and the United States. As a matter of fact, the development of Far East society had to be sus- tained with the fast development of a modern telecommunication infrastructure, and local administrations were in many cases more than willing to at least partially finance this operation. To give an example, in 2006, South Korea was the first country in the world to install a widely diffused optical fiber, WDM-based access network [9], using a very new technol- ogy, even if standards were not yet consolidated and the selected technology was supplied by a single, small U.S. company. Though at that time probably the business case of this operation was not positive for the Korean carrier, the deployment of the new access net- work was seen as a strategic step in the modernization of the country. The combination of the bad financial position of the main carriers, of the presence of competitive carriers based on unbundling, and of the growth of new markets in eastern Europe and the Far East drove the evolution of the access network toward solutions that did not require a change of the copper cable infrastructure already deployed for the tele- phone service. This was done by exploiting a technology development that was made available around the same time-with the development of cheap asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) chips, it was possible to convey on the copper access line much more capacity than the 64kbit/s of the standard telephone line. To use ADSL on the copper access lines, access equipment had to be changed, passing from access telephone switches to broadband digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAMs), but no new access cable had to be deployed, completely exploiting the available infrastructure. These solutions were thus ideal both to limit carrier CAPEX and to allow unbundling to be implemented. The period from the