The wireless carriers are market-driven. Companies who compete are not chasing radio frequency signals but rather they desperately need new subscribers to their wireless services. This means, in the initial stages of wireless competition, carriers will deploy cell sites in an attempt to achieve coverage. The way to achieve coverage is: get as high an antenna as possible and send the signal as far as possible. The strength of a signal will suggest whether it can be received (and responded to), but signal strength is not a guarantee of service.

When enough subscribers try to use a cell site, the individual facility will max out, and some customers will get "System Busy" on their displays. This is not a coverage problem: the strongest signal in the world can't fix an overloaded capacity. The carrier will then try to increase capacity, either:

• At the cell site, which means the frequency can't be "re-used."
• At a new cell site, which means the frequency can be made available to a different user.

So, while the same cell site could be expanded for greater capacity, the concept of mobile telephony is to re-use the frequency by installing ever-smaller cell sites.

Thus, the request by the carrier for "adequate service" is not necessarily a need for more coverage. In fact, some of the carriers' biggest challenges right now are choosing between two different types of infrastructure:

• Those big cell sites that are sometimes called "towers" in the outlying areas and ...
• Smaller "in-fill" cell sites in high demand areas where regular customers are getting "System Busy" all the time.

Which problems need to be addressed in order to achieve "adequate service?" Both, and the measures for capacity are different than for coverage, and each carrier has different measures of performance.

So, let the industry figure it out. And, please, don't call it "coverage," if the area is already being served … it's capacity. As long as the industry gains, the carriers will have capacity problems.

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Kreines & Kreines, Inc.
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