a processor 106 b a mac 310 and a phy 110 b mac 310 comprises a conventional transmit circuit 112 b and a conventional receive circuit 114 b mac 310 also comprises an adaptive access control circuit 316 which can be implemented in hardware software or any combination thereof mac 310 further comprises a received byte counter rbc 320 a transmitted byte counter tbc 322 a register 324 for storing a traffic differential threshold tdt a register 326 for storing a monitoring window length mwl and a transmit delay counter tdc 328 phy 110 b comprises a conventional baseband processor 128 b a conventional rf circuit 130 b and a conventional antenna 132 b in the described embodiments the registers and counters in mac 310 employ the following units although of course other units can be used received byte counter 320 counts the number of bytes of data received from wireless client 302 during a monitoring window transmitted byte counter 322 counts the number of bytes of data transmitted to wireless client 302 during the monitoring window register 324 stores the traffic differential threshold in terms of a number of bytes of data register 326 stores the monitoring window length in units of seconds transmit delay counter 328 stores a transmit delay interval in units of microseconds while only one wireless client is shown in fig3 it will be apparent to one skilled in the relevant arts after reading this description that wireless access point 306 can exercise adaptive access control over multiple clients for example wireless access point 306 can have tdc rbc and tbc counters for each client further wireless access point 306 can use different values of mwl and tdt for.