A method and apparatus to preserve bandwidth in a communication system are described wherein a receiver receives a first frame of transport blocks from a mobile device and an error detection module connected to the receiver detects whether each transport block contains an error. The error detection module generates an error indicator value to indicate whether each transport block contains an error or does not contain an error. A frame generator connected to the error detection module generates a second frame with the transport blocks that do not contain an error and the error indicator values. A first network interface is configured to send the second frame to a radio network controller. Other embodiments are described and claimed.