In wireless communications systems, a client terminal performs cell search procedure to find a suitable cell and camp on it to receive service from the network. In 3GPP LTE wireless communication system, the cell search involves the decoding of the Physical Broadcast Channel (PBCH) which may take relatively long time to decode under poor channel conditions which in turn may affect the time it takes to receive service from a cell after cell reselection or handover. A method and apparatus are disclosed that perform the PBCH decoding across multiple instances that carry partly different and partly common PBCH information. This method enables a client terminal to receive service from a cell faster than conventional methods.