There are provided measures for network-assisted fallback to contention-based random access. Such measures exemplarily comprise, at a target access point being a target of a handover of a terminal connected to at least one net-receiving work slice from a source access point, receiving a handover request including information on said at least one network slice, selecting, from a plurality of pools of random access channel resources to be used for contention-based random access processing, a first pool of random access channel resources to be used by said terminal upon fallback to contention-based random access during a handover processing, wherein said selecting is based on at least one of network slice related information on terminals in radio resource control idle mode, on terminals in radio resource control inactive mode, and/or on terminals in radio resource control connected mode, and of available random access channel resources, and transmitting a handover request acknowledgement message including handover assistance information indicative of said first pool of random access channel resources.