A communications system and method of ordered borrowing which facilitates dynamic access to a global channel set that has been partitioned into subsets, with each cell of the system being assigned a particular subset of the channel set. The assignment of channel subsets is performed in such a way as to respect various constraints imposed by the physical layout. Calls originating in a cell are first assigned to the channels allocated to the base station of that cell, in an order determined by the cell. Once the allotted channels are exhausted, i.e. in the busy state, the cell attempts to borrow channels from those allotted to the base stations of neighboring cells in a specified order. The borrowing cell borrows a specified number of channels from each neighbor before returning to a particular cell to borrow additional channels. The channels borrowed from a neighbor are accessed in an order which is substantially the reverse of the order in which they are accessed by the owner cell. This prescribes, for each cell, a prespecified order in which the entire set of channels may be accessed by calls originating in that cell.