A method, an apparatus, and a computer program product for wireless communication are disclosed in which a base station provides an extended bandwidth having an extension portion and a non-extension portion. The base station can indicate for a particular user equipment (UE) to utilize only a portion of the extended bandwidth. In this way, the extended bandwidth can include multiplexed resources directed to a plurality of UEs, improving capacity and/or throughput. Moreover, backwards compatibility with devices compatible with LTE Release 8 can be achieved, as those devices can be directed to utilize only the non-extension portion of the extended bandwidth. In one aspect, the base station indicates a system bandwidth including resource blocks associated with the non-extension portion and resource blocks associated with the extension portion, and the UE is not required to monitor more than a predetermined number of resource blocks to receive a downlink transmission.