The teachings presented herein enable a user terminal to perform a fast recovery from a radio link failure. In one aspect, the improvement in recovery time is achieved by commanding or otherwise causing the user terminal to perform radio link failure (RLF) recovery at a cell that is known to possess the user context, while considering that this cell should yield good radio conditions (if not the best) to the user terminal. A cell may be predefined for use by the user terminal in recovering its radio connection. Based on providing signal strength thresholds to the user terminal, for use in determining whether to use a predefined cell for reconnecting to the network, the user terminal attempts RLF recovery first in the predefined cell. By providing user context to the predefined cell in advance of a recovery attempt by the user terminal, the time for recovery is lessened. Note that the user terminal also may infer which cells are preferred.