A wireless communication network makes intelligent accept/reject decisions responsive to sector selection requests by mobile stations based on sharing per-sector loading information and per-sector mobile station received signal quality information. For example, the signal quality and sector loading information for each sector in a given mobile station's active set of sectors can be evaluated to determine whether the sector targeted by the mobile station for selection as its new serving sector for high-speed packet data service is the “best” sector for serving the mobile station. The network can identify the “best” serving sector based on one or more metrics. If the targeted sector is not the best one for serving the mobile station, the network sends a reject message, or it may send a redirect message pointing the mobile station to the best serving sector. The disclosed accept/reject processing advantageously applies to cdma2000 and W-CDMA networks, for example.