Speech at the beginning of a talkspurt in a discontinuous transmission (DTX) packet telephony system is speeded up to help make up for an access delay incurred during channel allocation. Incoming speech frames are buffered, a pitch period for a current portion of the signal is estimated, and then a pitch period=s worth of the signal is cut from that portion. This is continued until the original access delay, as estimated from the time lag between the commencement of voice input for the talkspurt, and notification that a channel is available, is eliminated. The remainder of the talkspurt is then transmitted without such compression.