 Transport and the United States. Drivers for Telecommunication Network Evolution The analysis we have carried out in the last two sections is mainly centered on American and European carriers. As far as Far East carriers are concerned, three main differences can be identified. 1. The network has to be developed from green field in a few areas due to the fact that no previous network exists. 2. There is no great attention to boost competition; on the contrary, in a few impor- tant cases, the administration supports the "de facto" monopolist with the target of accelerating the creation of an infrastructure that is strategic for the country's growth. 3. Mainly in Japan and in China, local players are practically favored due to both the difficulty entering the market and the very specific requirements. However, excluding Japan where the market is already consolidated and has strong entry barriers, over a period of time, almost all developing countries will grow from a social and economic point of view, and the market will become more and more global. This will probably cause the market dynamics to be more and more similar to that depicted for the United States and Europe. 2.2 Requirements for Next Generation Networks 2.2.1 Network Operational Costs In the previous section, we analyzed from different points of view, the CAPEX of telecom- munication carriers. However, besides being CAPEX intensive, operating a telecommuni- cation network also requires big OPEX. A very effective classification of the different sources of OPEX is reported in [31]. In par- ticular, the following OPEX sources are identified: Operational costs to maintain the network in a failure-free situation. The cost cat- egory comprises rent of space in central offices, power consumption of the equip- ment, cost of personnel that in normal conditions operate in the central office, and SO on. Operational costs to keep track of alarms and prevent failures. Control of the net- work performances via the control plane is a typical cost belonging to this cl