100 may include two modems within a modem pool and the clients 104 a through 104 n may include three clients a first client having four hours of priority access and having actually accessed the critical resource five hours in the previous month a second client having one hundred fifty hours of priority access and having actually accessed the critical resource twenty hours in the previous month and a third client having one hundred fifty hours of priority access and having actually accessed the critical resource two hundred hours in the previous month these clients thus have a priority of 4 u2212 5 u2212 1 150 u2212 20 130 set to 0 and 150 u2212 200 u2212 50 respectively therefore if the first and the second clients were connected the first client may be denied access because it has lower priority of access if the first and the third clients were connected the third client may be similarly denied access if the second and the third clients were connected the third client may similarly be denied access referring next to fig2 a flowchart of a method according to one embodiment of the invention is shown the method is desirably realized at least in part as one or more programs running on a server computer u2014 that is as a program executed from a computer readable medium such as a memory by a processor such programs are desirably made up of computer instructions for execution on the computer the programs are also desirably storable on a computer readable medium such as a floppy disk or a cd rom for distribution and installation and execution on another suitably equipped.