UL CE consumption is much higher than DL mainly because of HSDPA (which has fixe d CE consumption).

effectivelly, with a fixed number of CEs multiple UEs can be served but its UE requires its own CE for the uplink (either R99 or HSUPA) the mapping between CE and SF are as follows: SF64 --> 1 SF32 --> 1 SF16 --> 2 SF8 --> 4 SF4 --> 8 2SF4 --> 16 2SF2 --> 32 2SF2+2SF4 --> 48 you should also bear in mind that soft handover makes the condition even worse f or UL CE consumption. HSDPA is not affected at all, whereas both R99 or HSUPA (depending what it used for the reverse channel) is affected by soft-handover overhead