A wireless communication circuit configured for communicating over a wireless local area network (WLAN) in its reception area to communicate real-time application (RTA) packets as well as non-real time (non-RTA) packets. RTA packet retransmission is performed with lower latency in response to performing an immediate retransmission scheme that can bypass the need to contend for channel access, and/or without waiting for notifications back from a receiver before channel access. In other instances the RTA packets contend for retransmission access without a contention time window increase.