cost- benefit analysis to determine the optimal number of sectors for CDMA in any particu- lar environment. Adaptive phased arrays, or smart antennas, at the base stations may allow a CDMA system to gain the advantage of narrow-beam radio links without the serving provider having to pay for a lot of sectors. It depends on the relative cost and complexity of the smart antenna technology and having more antenna faces at the base station. Similar capacity advantages may be available using narrow-beam antennas at the user termi- nal, which is practical for wireless local loop (WLL), where the user terminal is in a fixed location. 30.2 Soft and Softer Handoff The rigorous power-control requirements of CDMA led to the development of soft hand- off to maintain the performance of a CDMA call able to be served by two antenna faces. This feature allows the system to maintain minimum power for these boundary calls. The cost associated with soft handoff is significant. Typically, about one-half of all calls are in the soft-handoff state. This means that one-half of the calls are using two or more forward channels from two or more sectors. If exactly one-half of the calls used exactly two channels each, then the forward-capacity cost of soft-handoff traffic would one-third of the total. 1 Since some of these calls are using three or more forward channels, we end up losing almost half the total capacity. This is not a cost of the soft-handoff feature, however. It is a cost of having subscriber traffic nearly equal in more than one sector with rapidly changing radio propagation. The soft handoff is the technical solution that gets the best quality and most capacity from this adverse phenomenon of nature. Handling this with a rapid series of hard handoffs would be less satisfactory because it would have the wireless telephone sys- tem chasing the optimal radio path after the fact. At the cost of some capacity up front, 1Consider the simplified case of two cells, each of which, independently, has a capacity of 30 calls. If 20 cal