In a general CDMA cellular system environment, extending the relative portion of soft handoff region to the whole cell area is bound to enlarge the cell coverage area, which in turn increases the new call arrival rate of the cell. Performance analysis on the CDMA system, however, was conducted in the several papers with the new call arrival rate in a cell given fixed, based on the incorrect setting for a general environment that the relative portion of the soft handoff region can be increased while keeping the new call arrival rate of the cell constant. We exactly analyze the effect of the soft handoff scheme on the CDMA system performance, rending the opposite result to the previous studies. To highlight the accuracy of our analysis, the well-known performance measures are also obtained with the traffic model and Markovian queuing model.