ategories: incumbent carriers and competitive carriers. Incumbent carriers are characterized by a large, well-structured organization by a set of coded processes (probably relater to global quality certifications) and by the owner- ship of almost all the network they use to deliver services. On the contrary, competitive carriers have a lighter organization and the general cost of a process is smaller both for the simpler organization and for the lighter structure. On the other hand, competitive carriers have higher costs in terms of consultancy services from the vendors since generally a set of activities that an incumbent operated through its own organizations are delegated to vendors by competitive carriers. In Figure 8.30 the labor cost related to service management for a European incumbent carrier is shown considering a traditional network architecture and an architecture imple- menting ASON/GMPLS control plane. The costs are divided into the processes we have considered in the previous analysis and the cost related to each process is further divided considering the carrier professional group carrying on the work. Costs are reported in normalized units. Telecommunication Networks Normalized OPEX Service offer and SLA Service provisioning Sales Project management Service cease Administration Network ops. FIGURE 8.30 Service management labor cost for an incumbent carrier considering a traditional network and an architecture implementing ASON/GMPLS control plane. (After Pasqualini, S. et al., IEEE Commun. Mag., 6, 28, 2005.) The first observation is that network automation reduces drastically the network man- agement costs needed in a traditional network, for example, to provision a new connection or to reroute a connection. These operations that require a relevant amount of manual work in a traditional network are completely automated via the control plane. The counterpart is that the carrier front end, especially the sales group, has to face a more difficult work, absorbing more costs than in the traditional c