A reference signal cyclic shift (CS) is quantized as a combination of a cell specific CS with an outcome of a pseudo-random hopping, and an indication of the cell specific CS is broadcast in the cell. In one embodiment the CS is quantized as a modulo operation on a sum of the cell specific CS, the outcome of the pseudo-random hopping, and a user specific CS, in which case an indication of the user specific CS is sent in an uplink resource allocation and a user sends its cyclically shifted reference signal in the uplink resource allocated by the uplink resource allocation. The CS may also be quantized according to length of the reference signal as cyclic_shift_symbol=(cyclic_shift_value*length of the reference signal)/12; where cyclic_shift_value is between zero and eleven and cyclic_shift_symbol is the amount of CS given in reference signal symbols.