 Due to the lack of real competition and the amount of effort needed to design and upgrade the switches, all telephone carriers offered the customers essentially the same service profile, with a noticeable difference existing only in the United States and western Europe. Telecommunication Networks As far as business customers are concerned, the product offering dedicated to them was quite richer. Besides plain telephone and dedicated lines to support the multiplexed data coming from corporate switches (Private Automatic Branch eXchange [PABX]), data traffic were also required. In order to convey data generated from business customers, the technology put at the designer's disposal different techniques from the integrated services digital network (ISDN) and frame relay protocols [3] that were able to embed data in a time division multiplexing (TDM) frame, to the complex and performing asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) [4,5], using both statistical multiplexing and statistical switching. Generally, frame relay and ATM networks were superimposed on the telephone net- work, constituting a second, independent telecommunication infrastructure dedicated to business customers. At the beginning of the 1990s, a big evolution happened both in the market and in the available technologies. The Internet revolution brought about a sudden evolution in trans- mission and switching techniques and a complete redesign of the telecommunication net- work. The end result of this huge effort is the network that we have today. The process to produce this result was not smooth, but involved a rapid and huge growth of the value of the telecommunication market, the so-called telecommunication bubble, and the subsequent market crisis, that in a certain measure still affects the telecommunica- tion market today, more than 10 years from the bubble end. The main driver of the evolution, started in the early 1990s, was the diffusion of the Internet among small businesses and in the consumer market via the dial-up connection. The impact of this