Mechanisms for optimizing the selection of a new legal channel during regulatory domain changes and improving the user experience during changes in the underlying physical link having wide applicability to many wireless communications links are disclosed. Applications comprise cellular networks, WLANs, WPANs. Wireless USB, high speed channels for Bluetooth and other uses of WiMedia as well as a wide range of radio technologies that use a number of time and/or frequency-domain separation techniques to create multiple channels in a given portion of the RF spectrum where there is no global agreement on the use of the RF spectrum. Differences could pertain to permitted frequency ranges, permitted power levels, requirements to detect and/or avoid other radio technologies, indoor/outdoor use requirements, and many others. The disclosed embodiments provide a method for taking advantage of, or at least minimizing the impact of, a change in the channel link which impacts the channel characteristics such as the available bandwidth.