A mobile communication device (102) includes both a wide area network (WAN) radio modem (122), and a personal area network (PAN) radio modem (134), which operate on similar frequencies. When the both the WAN and PAN modems are operating and carrying time-sensitive data, the WAN modem disables transmission by the PAN modem when the WAN modem is due to receive data from a WAN base station (406), including neighbor scans. The duration and frequency of disabling the PAN modem is controlled so that the retransmission is successful.