A technique for jitter buffer management for improved power savings in a wireless communication device (100) includes defining (202) a jitter buffer threshold for the wireless communication device, determining (204) that an amount of packets in the jitter buffer falls below the threshold, sending a trigger (206) to obtain queued voice packets from an access point, downloading (208) queued voice packets from the access point, and adding (212) the voice packets from the access point to the jitter buffer in the wireless communication device (100).