Current developments in technologies and markets stress the importance of exible and robust performance optimisation and congestion control. In intelligent networks, congestion control has traditionally taken a purely technical view and focused on pro- tecting individual nodes from harmful overloads. We take a profit oriented, network wide view and develop a congestion control mechanism to ensure real time performance under profit maximisation. Numerical studies in a simulator show that the proposed mechanism is robust and, in particular in overloaded states, provides a substantial improvement in comparison to conventional load control mechanisms.