igitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Mobile Switching Center (MSC) Planning Mobile Switching Center (MSC) Planning MSC equipment should be deployed in sufficient quantity that there is very little blocking at the switch. This is the result of traffic engineering studies based on forecast demand for MSC resources. It is wasteful to spend a lot of money on base stations, an- tenna faces, and air-interface capacity only to lose calls because the MSC lacks enough capacity. The MSC may seem expensive at US $5 million, but it is a trifling expense compared with all the base stations. We are protecting the base station investment by having enough, and perhaps more than enough, MSC equipment and MSC capacity. For the main processor, we should evaluate the total load from call processing, SMS, and handoffs. We should make sure that there is enough processor capacity to handle all this activity with enough extra that we do not run out of capacity. The MSC has to have enough capacity for all its transport needs. We can add up all the transport requirements for base stations, the PSTN, the PPDN, private networks, and the ANSI-41 signaling network to get a minimum figure for transport. We must add some extra transport capacity for inter-MSC transport, as described in Chap. 37. These transport links are required for inter-MSC handoffs and are recommended for cost reduction in roamer terminations and mobile-to-mobile calls. There also should be enough MSC capacity for loopback trunks to support mobile-to-mobile calls where both ends of the call are at the same MSC. Circuit-switching capacity at the MSC should be enough for all the voice calls and all real-time video calls as well. Even if real-time video becomes very popular, we do not expect it to be a major player compared with the quantity of voice calls in using up circuit-switching capacity at the MSC. There also should be enough speech coders at the MS