A tone detector and associated method for use with EVRC-B and GSM vocoders to enable reliable detection of system connect tones over a wireless communication system. The tone detection method examines a number of sequential data frames of the signal received from the vocoder and determines that the tone is present if the spectral energy at frequencies around the tone is much higher than that at neighboring frequencies and if the calculated center frequency of the data frames is at or near the frequency of the tone.