I'm not an RF engineer but isn't there a limit to how many times they can do that before the neighboring cells and phones start to interfere with each other? I know with CDMA that transmissions not intended for you show up as background noise. Reach a certain threshold and the S/N ratio will be too low for your phone/data card to work properly.
I'd imagine there's also a cost issue to that, particularly in rural areas where they don't have the luxury of slapping cell sites on existing structures and need to build or lease towers.
CDMA controls handset's transmit power in a real time loop, the mathematics requires to know the signal loss from the handset to the base station to figure out what the original signal coming out of the handset was. From what I just googled about GSM, it has power control, but only 8 levels, .8 watts is the lowest, then 2 watts. 99% of GSM handsets have a max transmit power of 2 watts anyways.
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