A user equipment (UE) employing different radio access technologies (RATs) concurrently or successively provides the UE the opportunity to select a particular RAT to support an access service used by one or more software applications of the UE. A RAT operational control scheme provides for opportunistic enablement and disablement of a RAT and/or intra-RAT configuration so as to provide sufficient uplink and downlink throughput for supported software applications while reducing unnecessary power consumption by the UE, which often is battery powered.