In a wireless packet switching telecommunications network, voice services are provided by having a compressor/decompressor in each mobile station to provide each voice packet with a compressed header. Voice data and signalling data are sent separately and in different data formats to the air interface. The compressed header may be an M bit and a cyclically reset timeclick_number, which is decompressed by use of a wallclock which counts reset cycles to reinstate the voice packet headers. Alternatively, RTP agents are provided at the compression and decompression points, and voice packets are sent without headers over a "high quality" network such as a frame relay or ATM network. Compression state of a voice packet header can be established by sending call setup information over an out-of-band channel between compression points in a mobile station and in the network.