  In this paper we study the spectrum of certain large random Hermitian Jacobi
matrices. These matrices are known to describe certain communication setups. In
particular we are interested in an uplink cellular channel which models mobile
users experiencing a soft-handoff situation under joint multicell decoding.
Considering rather general fading statistics we provide a closed form
expression for the per-cell sum-rate of this channel in high-SNR, when an
intra-cell TDMA protocol is employed. Since the matrices of interest are
tridiagonal, their eigenvectors can be considered as sequences with second
order linear recurrence. Therefore, the problem is reduced to the study of the
exponential growth of products of two by two matrices. For the case where $K$
users are simultaneously active in each cell, we obtain a series of lower and
upper bound on the high-SNR power offset of the per-cell sum-rate, which are
considerably tighter than previously known bounds.
