tion command that identi- fies the two endpoints, thereby reducing operational overhead. This implies that a technician could provision more orders in a day-assuming the demand for an additional order existed-or the carrier could reduce the pro- visioning staff. Again, the proper comparison is an OAM&P on a new mesh network versus an OAM&P on a cascaded-ring network that was already paid for, deployed, engineered, tested, in service, and operations support system (OSS) integrated (and had a trained staff). We are not making the case for slow innovation; we are just urging a proper financial analysis of the two alternatives. Equipment vendors and consultants continue to make the case that the volume of data traffic keeps increasing over time, while the volume of voice traffic tends to remain stable over time. This would drive new architectures, presumably forcing a transition away from SONET/SDH systems. The fol- lowing paragraph attempts to bring some perspective to this issue. The research firm Ovum places the voice volume at about 30 Tbps and data at about 400 Tbps in 2002.4 By 2006, the volume of voice will be approximately the same, while the volume for data is expected to grow to 700 Tbps (this equates to a compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 15 per- cent). Now take into account numbers published by the New Paradigm Group, which tend to show (at least for the United States) a revenue parity for data and voice for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) in a few years. Some people quote a more slanted 80 to 20 percent split with Chapter 7 voice being the 80 percent. Our critical take-away from the vendors' asser- tions regarding data versus voice volume is that the revenue per bit for data services is one-thirteenth the revenue per bit for voice services (see Fig- ure 7-7). Although this configuration may need tweaking in later years, our figure points to the fact that revenue on data channels is much smaller Voice Volume (Tbps) Data Volume (Tbps) Figure 7-7 Voice/data volume versus voice revenue per bi