ious smart services). 3.8.2 NGN Regulation Aspects With the transition of telecom operators from legacy digital networks to NGN, the tele- com regulation does not change significantly. However, there are a number of issues regarding NGN regulation. For example, the regulator needs to regulate access to the non-competitive wholesale markets (e.g. controlled by one or two NGN providers). Sim- ilarly, regulation can be targeted to ensure that ISPs have wholesale access to the NGN provider. Further, various diverse services may share the same NGN. NGN fosters mobile-fixed convergence (e.g. the same service functions are used for both types of access networks), mobile and fixed services should be treated as interlinked. Also, regulation must focus more on the key bottleneck of the access network technologies. However, NGN adds some new factors into the regulation sphere. One of the specific approaches to regulation with the deployment of NGN is separation, which has two main forms [31], structural and functional. 3.8 Business and Regulatory Aspects Structural separation creates a separate access business which is strongly regulated, while service providers are then lightly regulated. Such separate businesses provide ser- vices to the other players in the ICT ecosystem (in different verticals) on a wholesale basis. Meanwhile, functional separation does not require separate businesses, SO in this case the broadband access service provider remains part of a larger business. The access business is only functionally separated (and not legally as a certain separate business), SO in this case it can deliver equivalent services to its own services as well as to other service providers. Regarding regulation, the targets with the NGN remain the same as legacy networks, that is, encouragement of competition between different providers where it is possible. When it is not possible to have more than one core NGN, the access rules and the prices for using the NGN-capable network become critical. How can the regulator be certain tha