Methods, apparatus and computer program products are provided to facilitate the acquisition of radio recourses when an initial redirect attempt to acquire the necessary resources fails. The disclosed embodiments enable the determination as to whether or not a desired service is available on a target set of radio resources. Upon the failure to acquire the service, a preferential search of additional radio resources is conducted for acquisition of the service. The disclosed concepts are applicable to a variety of technologies, such as UMTS, GSM, 3GPP WCDMA and LTE, 3GPP2 1xRTT and HRPD, WLAN, WiMAX, DSL and passive optical network (PON). This Abstract is provided for the sole purpose of complying with the Abstract requirement rules that allow a reader to quickly ascertain the disclosed subject matter. Therefore, it is to be understood that it should not be used to interpret or limit the scope or the meaning of the claims.