One way to increase frequency spectrum utilisation in a mobile communication system is to divide the geographical region spatially into a number of cells, each of which contains a base station. Each base station is assigned a set of channels, and the users in the neighbourhood of a base station can transmit their messages to the base station. Several protocols governing the access to the base station channels are available. The paper considers multichannel CSMA schemes embedded in a spatially celluar communication environment. Several alternative ways of organising the system resources, layout and protocol are considered. The complexity of the system is progressively increased, culminating in the general case: each base station is assigned a set ofCachannels and users access any one of theknearest base stations with multichannel CSMA protocol. The performance characteristics of the system—normalised delay against system bandwidth utilisation—are given in terms of the system parameters. The several configurations considered are compared based on the delay, band-width utilisation and interference rejection characteristics.