mania,
1/ in alcatel : the MS are staying on one TRX, and the TRX is hopping onto several frequencies.
So the traffic will load the last trx first, etc. And you will see this behaviour in the rtch_traffic_erlang per TRX.
This is not true in other vendors !
2/ No : as said above, one faulty trx would only impact the 8 calls it is carrying, in ALU.
cheers!
pixx