Dedicated PDCH

Dedicated PDCHs can only be used for GPRS, the operator can specify between zero and eight dedicated PDCHs per cell, the reason for dedicated PDCHs is to ensure that there is always the GPRS resources in a cell. To some extent the operators can specify to where they dedicated PDCH(s) to be located. However from a radio point of view, non hopping channels on the BCCH carrier are generally not equivalent to traffic channels on other frequencies. The operator can decide if the PDCH shall be allocated on the non-hopping BCCH frequency as primary or secondary choice, or with no preference.