In a wideband communication channel (> 100 MHz) local network, the propagation delay becomes comparable to the packet transmission time. As a result, CSMA-type protocols may not provide efficient channel utilization. A new channel access protocol, contention based channel reservation (CBCR) that is based on channel reservation is proposed in this paper. Our investigation reveals that the new channel access protocol yields better performance than that of CSMA-type protocols for operating in these high data rate environments. Thus, channel reservation allocation is a good alternative to the contention strategy for high speed local networks.