A method for preventing the occurrence of overload conditions in a multi-carrier communication system such as, but not limited to, enhancements to 1xEV-DV by controlling the amount of voice and data users having access to the communication system in order to provide enhanced QoS and load balancing. The method includes converting one of carriers in the multi-carrier voice/data system to a voice-only carrier when loading exceeds a given threshold related to QoS and outage criteria.