Coverage has great impact on LTE subscriber experience when one considers Gap Measurement occurrences in a highly mobile environment where handover happens due to coverage limitation. It can be said that the number of gap measurement occurences is a measure of the coverage continuity of a cluster - if extended, coverage continuity of an LTE network.
Coverage assessment could be effectively done using the RATA (Random Access per Timing Advance) indices. Below is an illustration of a cluster coverage assessment using these counters:
When this is taken in connection with the following figure,
One can have the following observations;
On the average, the main lobe of the antennas are directed at the
234-546mrange which corresponds to RATA2 (L.RA.TA.UE.Index2).the effective coverage is from
156m-1950m(approx. 2kms!, if this is on a CBD then definitely sector coverage is overshooting).assuming that you have a 20m antenna height covering the effective linear range as indicated above, on the average, you have a 4-6DEG antenna downtilt standard setting for all sectors.
L1800 and L2600 coverage are perfectly coincident, therefore balancing can be effectively done between these layers, a push to L26 initiative would be a potential direction with great benefits to subscriber experience.
L700 is definitely not coincident with the other layers, which presents some potential problem, it could be due to a sparse deployment or a different coverage intention other than the two but most definitely overshooting just like L18 and L26.
See, just by looking into these figures one can have insight on the actual network coverage extent of the LTE sites.