h a system would have mostly forward- direction data use on work days and mostly reverse-direction image transmission on weekends. The flexible TD-SCDMA carrier allows the service provider simply to allo- cate enough capacity for the total traffic at any particular time and let the system take care of the balance. 38.2 Market-Entry Planning Issues The history of the cellular market in the United States has been a tough road. The Fed- eral Communications Commission (FCC) allocated spectrum to two service providers in each market SO that subscribers would have a choice and there would be competition. The service providers who got to market first found a swarm of subscribers waiting ea- gerly for cellular service. The second providers had the harder job of establishing their markets. Typically, they offered very favorable deals with extremely generous offerings of cellular air time. The effect of this was to overload their systems and, because the first providers would match the deal, to overload both cellular systems. A 3G CDMA service provider is investing a lot of time and money in a large system designed to serve millions of subscribers. If we are building a 500-cell system at US$500,000 per cell with three mobile switching centers (MSCs) at $5 million per MSC to serve 1 million user terminals at $300 each, we are spending $565 million before spending a dime on telephone transport, maintenance, or marketing. Investors spend- ing this amount of money want to see a return on their investment, a revenue stream that will earn them a profit. 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. Special Situations Planning for CDMA Capacity Most of the new 3G CDMA systems are going into markets already well served by ex- listing cellular technologies. The voice market is well established but also well served. The data market is not established and will