A system and method for reducing power consumption and interference in a
communications system that has multiple base radios. A base radio
controller assigns priorities to the base radios in the system. When
higher priority base radios have excess capacity, intracell handovers are
used to consolidate communications from lower priority base radios to
higher priority base radios. After transferring communications to higher
priority base radios, the lower priority base radios can attenuate or
shut off their transmitted signal in order to reduce or eliminate all the
interference they cause other base stations in the system, and reduce
transmission power requirements.