HANDLING TRACKING AREA UPDATE REJECT WITHOUT EXTENDED DELAY

A method, apparatus and computer program product are described for reducing delay when making a network connection between user equipment (UE) and a network node when a tracking area update (TAU) request has been denied during LTE reselection. Following a revised signaling protocol, a UE can avoid activation of a NAS Attach Retry timer and move directly to establishing a connection to the network, reducing the UE communications delay from about eleven seconds to less than one second.