In this paper, it is shown that the coexistence of a variety of different traffics in third generation cellular networks may lead to a very undesirable behavior of the whole network: a metastability property. When this property holds, the state of the network fluctuates on a very long time scale between different set of states. These long oscillations of the network make impossible to predict the average performances of some of the key characteristics of the connections, such as the handoff blocking rate or the probability of call blocking. As a consequence, the quality of service provided by such a network can be guaranteed only by, sometimes poor, lower bounds. Experiments of a UMTS network with this behavior are presented and the analysis of a corresponding simplified mathematical model is developed. The practical implications in the design of radio resource management for CDMA cellular networks are discussed.