eaving the call on a neighboring cell sector on the same carrier is actually worse for CDMA ca- pacity than accepting it when radio conditions warrant a handoff. Usually it is the call with the worst radio conditions, the weakest signal from the lowest radio path gain, that is going to be lost. The overloaded CDMA carrier is going to experience high BER on all its channels and is going to send all its user terminals power-up messages. In the reverse direction, one of them is going to run out of trans- mit power before the others and is going to be drowned out by the others as they climb up the power curve. In the forward direction, the base station amplifier is going to run out of transmit power, and one of the calls is going to have more noise or external sources of interference than the others and is going to be lost first. 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. Turning User Complaints into Useful Data Increasing Capacity The cause of the CDMA carrier overload does not have to be local. In conventional reuse, a call several cells away can cause cochannel interference. In CDMA, the inter- ference is mostly the same cell and neighboring cells, but a call appearing on a neigh- boring cell can send a CDMA carrier into overload and cause it to drop one of its calls. A user terminal can move from high to low path gain, and somebody else loses a call, perhaps on the same cell sector but possibly on a neighboring sector or cell. Our CDMA carrier frequencies are low enough to be resistant to rain drops, but there is some at- tenuation in a heavy storm, and this may be enough to drop one or two calls. 40.4 Lousy-Call Complaints Poor sound quality is usually caused by channel degradation less severe than a lost call. The interference and noise go up faster than the signal can, the Eb/No goes down, the BER goes up, and the speech quality dete