Abstract: A mobile terminal for communicating with a base station in a packet radio services network. The terminal has a processor for determining one of a plurality of channels for communication between the mobile terminal and the base station; for digitally coding speech to provide speech information; for assembling speech information into speech packets; and for generating channel allocation requests for a channel in which to send speech packets. A radio transmitter is provided for transmitting the requests and the packets to a base station in the network. A radio receiver receives identities of channels allocated by the base station for the mobile terminal to transmit on. The processor is responsive to each received channel allocation to determine that packets are sent on the allocated channel. In the GPRS since a channel is released when there is no packet to transmit, higher traffic levels can be obtained using the same number of radio channels.