Soft frequency reuse (SFR) is a common technique for co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation in cellular OFDMA networks. The performance of such networks significantly depends on the configuration of the power profiles that implement the soft frequency reuse patterns. In this paper, we investigate the performance of static soft frequency reuse by comparing it against the optimal case, in which a central entity optimally distributes power among the users of the network. It is shown that there is a significant performance gap between both approaches, which needs to be filled by adaptive SFR mechanisms. Moreover, we show that the achievable gain of static SFR is small in a system that is able to optimally decide on terminal/sub-carrier assignments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.