Systems and methodologies are described that facilitates managing assignment of available random access resources in order to minimize delay and random access load. A number of available random access resources can be defined by a network or a base station, wherein a user equipment can access the number of available random access resources via an information block. The user equipment can be randomly assigned or uniformly assigned to at least one of the number of available random access resources. Additionally, the network can adjust the defined number of available random access resources based upon reported delay, base station load, or historic load data for a base station.