andle more than 20 calls. 2Handoffs are a little tricky here because a CDMA channel interferes with its neighbors even after a handoff is complete. The migration of a call from one cell sector to another is made even more gentle by soft handoff. 3It has been a long tradition to blame the telephone company for problems at the other end of the line. We see no reason for this tradition to change for wireless data service. 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 subscribers who feel they are getting less than they are paying for. Significant periods of slow data are a sign of an overloaded CDMA carrier. It may be that there are enough bursty data subscribers so that the traffic engineering parameters have to be adjusted. This means that the CDMA carrier may have to operate at a lower occupancy than orig- inally planned, and this means sending fewer revenue-producing bits over the same air interface. It is important to respond to slow data problems because of subscriber perceptions, as well as system performance. The marketing success of 3G depends on its users feel- ing good about it, but its technical success depends on its ability to deliver high data rates on demand. When this starts to fail, especially to the point where subscribers complaining about it, we must find the root causes. 40.6 Data-Error Complaints When subscribers complain about data errors, we first make sure that the equipment path is solid. The subscribers' equipment may be causing the errors, or the wireless ser- vice provider's packet data equipment may be in need of maintenance. Once the equip- ment issues are put to rest, we can focus our attention on the air interface as the source of subscriber data errors. Poor radio conditions are an obvious place to look for wireless data errors. The path gain is lo