A great part of core network operators’ gross profit comes from the provisioned connectivity services. In this work, we analyze the provisioning of differentiated services in current Shared Path Protection (SPP) environments. This analysis concludes that, with current resource assignment policies, only a very poor grade of service can be provided to the carried best effort traffic. Hence, we propose diff-WS, a resource partitioning scheme that differentiates those wavelengths supporting each class of service in the network. The benefits of diff-WS in front of current resource assignment policies are afterwards evaluated from an economic perspective. To this goal, we define the NORMA problem as a revenue maximization problem. To solve NORMA, we introduce statistical models to obtain, for a given grade of service, the highest traffic intensity for each supported class of service and resource assignment scheme. From the numerical results, we show that diff-WS maximizes resource utilization in the network and, thus, network operator’s profit.