A user equipment (UE) operating in a wireless network receives a sequence of speech frames on a speech channel. The UE demodulates at least a portion of a speech frame of the sequence of received speech frames to produce a metric value. The UE discontinues processing of the speech frame and enters a low power discontinuous reception (DRX) mode if the metric value indicates absence of valid speech data, and ignores and does not demodulate at least the next remaining bursts of the speech frame after entering DRX mode.