— Prior work has shown that network capacity efficiency decreases significantly as a network’s topology becomes sparse. Meta-mesh restoration was proposed in prior work as a means of increasing capacity efficiency in such networks, and showed significant improvements relative to span restoration. In the present work herein, we now study the effects of converting an existing (or planned) span-restorable network to one employing meta-mesh restoration. We develop and analyze two new ILP design models, extensions of the original meta-mesh restoration design models, to maximize the average per-demand increase in working lightpaths the network can serve and fully protect if converted to meta-mesh.