A system for conveying priority associated with a communication conveyed among networks includes: (a) a first network originating the communication in packets; each respective packet including two segments; a first segment containing a portion of the communication in information payload bits in a first encoding scheme; a second segment containing overhead information relating to the packet in overhead bits in a second encoding scheme; a number of the overhead bits being configured to indicate the priority; and (b) a second network cooperating with the first network to alter encoding of the first segment of a selected packet-set to express the information payload bits in a third encoding scheme that is unreadable in the second network; the second network employing the priority-indicating bits to ascertain priority for handling the communication by the second network; the second network preempting lower priority resources to reserve resources for higher priority packet-sets.