A method and apparatus may improve success rate and time of call-setup while a mobile station is experiencing high interference. The method checks (255) if a mobile station is experiencing high-interference. This may occur when the mobile station fails to decode a paging channel of a serving cell (235) to read a first page. Upon determining that the mobile station is experiencing high-interference, the mobile station selects a set of cells (260) having the same location area identifier as the serving cell from a list of top neighboring cells, and selects a cell (265) from the set of cells, and synchronizes (270) with a base station of the selected cell. After synchronizing, the mobile station decodes the paging channel of the selected cell (275) and reads a second page from the paging channel of the selected cell including identical information data as the first page.