Abstract: A method and cellular communication network are provided that maintains a desired level of speech quality by controlling the admission of a new call within a serving cell of the network. More specifically, the method includes the step of establishing speech quality values for a serving cell and at least one of a plurality of surrounding cells being interfered with by the serving cell. The method then operates to determine whether or not to admit the new call to the serving cell by utilizing the speech quality measure of the serving cell and the speech quality measure of the at least one surrounding cell in a predetermined manner (e.g., cell level approach, sub-cell approach and combined approach) so as to maintain the desired level of speech quality within the serving cell and the at least one surrounding cell.