e by the persons working in the network control centers. On the other hand, this inefficient provisioning procedure was acceptable due to the rar- ity of provision events and the possibility that it would take days to carry out a provision. With the wide diffusion of broadband and the need of delivering wide band services to private customers, packet services began to be the main part of the traffic. At this point, the structure of a set of superimposed networks is no longer effective due to all the inefficiency related to it. In particular, in the Internet era, the traffic pattern is much more dynamic and difficult to foresee, both because commercial offerings of the carriers often vary and because cus- tomers frequently change both their way of using telecommunication services and the carrier delivering them services (as typical in a competitive market). With the substitution of ATM and frame relay with IP, the core packet machines (IP routers) [34] have gained greater capacity, SO to be able to absorb telephone traffic and to provide a unified switching system to the whole network. Naturally, this operation has to be performed without affecting the service delivered to customers, thus using specific equipment and software to simulate all the features of the telephone service via a packet network [35]. However, a problem remains. In order to assure very fast recovery from failures, local redundancy has to be provided SO that almost half the transport capacity of the network is devoted to protection from failures. This is true not only for the transmission lines (that are the lower availability elements of the network due to the probability of cable cut for civil works or other accidents) but also for the equipment elements like optical interfaces, switching matrixes, and SO on. This strategy, while technically quite effective, is contrary to the main requirement of the new network-it has to be cheap in terms of CAPEX, but, more importantly, it has to sensibly reduce the OPEX. Unifying the switching technology w