In this paper, we analyze and compare the Erlang capacity of multi-access systems supporting several different radio access technologies according to two different operation methods: separate and common operation methods. In the common operation, any terminal can connect to any sub-system while each terminal in the separate operation only can connect to its designated sub-system. In a numerical example with GSM/EDGE-like and WCDMA-like sub-systems, it is shown that we can get up to 60% Erlang

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... pacity improvement through the common operation method when using a near optimum so-called service-based user assignment scheme. Even with the worst-case assignment scheme, we can still get about 15% capacity improvement over the separate operation method.