by this interference. There is a statistical effect called soft blocking (described in Sec. 30.6) that mitigates the capacity reduction due to f and g. If we are engineering several sectors for a low blocking rate, then most of them will not be at their maximum capacity most of the time. In Sec. 28.5 we saw how to use that statistical smoothing of soft blocking to en- gineer more aggressively when there is a significant amount of intercell and intersec- tor interference. More aggressive engineering means serving more demand with the same CDMA carriers. The benefit of soft blocking does not mean that the interference is good for capacity, only that the damage can be reduced by relying on the statistical behavior of a larger community of interfering user terminals. If the adjacent cells and sectors have different time-of-day distributions, then we can be even more aggressive in our traffic engineering. For each sector we are planning, we should use f and g values that represent the other-cell and other-sector demand at the peak time of the serving sector. The shopping mall is busy at lunch, the office building is busy during the afternoon, and the commuter route is busy at night. If these three cells are next to each other, then we may be able to plan on serving more demand with each of the three cells because the neighbors are not busy at the same time. Deciding when to block calls is a fundamental engineering decision. A busy 3G CDMA system usually will run out of forward capacity first, so we can set the system to block calls when the forward transmit power reaches a certain level. Since we do not want to block handoffs of any sort, soft, softer, semisoft, or hard, we should leave some extra power in reserve for handoffs. Each cell sector is different, SO there is no hard and fast rule for when to block calls. Without any experience in the specific system, we would recommend setting the blocking criterion to half the maximum power and see- ing how often the amplifier gets close to full output. If the amplifier o