Patent ID: 8380528

Claim:
A method, comprising: provisioning services to a plurality of consumer equipment communicating with a packet switched network; recording historical resource utilization of the packet switched network; predicting a time of day when a threshold amount of services will be used in the packet switched network; reserving a remaining amount of services in the packet switched network to a bid-based granting process; sending bid requests from a server to each consumer equipment in the plurality of consumer equipment; receiving bids at the server from bidding agents operating in the plurality of consumer equipment; retrieving historical bids earlier accepted by the server from a bidding agent submitting a bid; comparing the bids by the server against each other; determining one of the consumer equipment has a history of high bids accepted by the server; determining the one consumer equipment has currently submitted a lower bid than other of the consumer equipment; and granting by the server a higher priority access to the one consumer equipment despite the lower bid.