between each pair of MSCs, or among combinations of three or more MSCs, but we can be more specific in our observations and note which cell combinations are causing high handoff rates. The solution may lie in the radio engineering department rather than in the signaling and facilities areas. If there is a zone with too many handoffs, then we should go back and diagnose the radio problems. Handoff add and drop parameters may need to be reset, or antenna patterns may need to be shifted by changing antennas or downtilting the existing antennas. 39.4.3 Intercarrier handoffs The system also should be telling us how many intercarrier handoffs we have in our wireless telephone system. These are handoffs from one CDMA carrier to another as a call is handed off from one sector to another. The receiving sector may have a lot more Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Measuring System Performance for Growth Increasing Capacity available CDMA resources on a different carrier, so it makes sense to switch the call from one carrier to another as it changes cell sector. Some vendor products use semisoft handoff to handle intercarrier handoffs seam- lessly, as described in Sec. 11.4.7. They make both antenna faces receptive to the call so that the system misses nothing as the user terminal switches frequency. It looks like a soft handoff to the system, whereas the user terminal performs a hard handoff. cdmaOne and cdma2000 require hard handoffs to change CDMA carrier frequencies, whereas wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) may allow a soft handoff by having the user ter- minal receive two different carrier frequencies from the two cell sectors. If we have to use hard handoffs to switch carriers, then this is a less efficient utilization of the CDMA resource. High levels of intercarrier handoffs tell us two things. First, they tell us where car- rier boundaries 