ith the use of the IP protocol stack is an important step in the direction of OPEX reduction. As a matter of fact, replacing the set of two or more insulated control planes with a single control plan allows operations like provisioning of new packet capacity to be carried out automatically, thereby gaining both a greater provisioning speed and a lower cost in terms of qualified personnel working in the control centers. Drivers for Telecommunication Network Evolution This effect is also enhanced by the fact that the IP control plane, whatever technical solu- tion is used, is a distributed intelligence system, working on the set of router control units. This system in standard conditions works without the need of human manual program- ming and the central control room is reduced to a simple reporting center where the status of the network is depicted to individuate possible critical issues or points of potential traf- fic congestion. All these advantages, however, risks to be counterbalanced by the huge waste of capac- ity due to the need for local redundancy increasing greatly the CAPEX needed to evolve the network. It is not difficult to imagine that using the distributed IP control plane, it is possible to devise complex algorithms that are able to exploit a small redundant capacity (much less than 50%) in order to reconfigure the paths affected by a failure and recover the correct network connectivity [36,37]. These algorithms, whatever be the used rerouting criterion, are slower than a simple switch between a working and a stand-by redundant capacity and in general do not satisfy the 50 ms requirement for protection fulfilled by the TDM network. The problem related to the failure recovery time is only one of the issues to be solved to transmit on a packet switched network a service requiring real-time data transmis- sion, and it is to consider that the telephone is not the only service of this type. Video streaming services are an important part of every broadband service offering, and a key point for its succ