A new performance criterion? Service deviation?

I came across a performance metric the early designers of the cellular systems employed. In their 1978 paper where they define the hybrid channel sharing algorithm, the authors Kahwa and Georganas, make use of the concept of Service Deviation defined in an early paper in 1973.

Defined as the standard deviation of call blocking probabilities of different cells, they took it as a performance metric, and wanted to make it as small as possible.

What is the relevance of this for an operator in data calls? Or across heterogeneous networks? Would it force network operators to cooperate? I will have to think about this.