When a cellular telephone is powered down, it sends a power-down message to a network it was registered with. If the cellular telephone does not receive an acknowledgement of the power-down message from the network, a flag is set in the cellular telephone. The power-down sequence is concluded by the cellular telephone, and the cellular telephone is shut off or put into a reduced power consumption state. When the telephone is turned back on the flag is evaluated to see if it was set during the course of powering down. The status of the flag when the phone is powered up is then used by the cellular telephone to determine whether it should make a network access request to a network the telephone was registered to, during the power-up operation in order to cause that cellular network to update its database regarding the whereabouts of the powered-up cellular telephone.