In a UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) based system, a wireless receiver comprises a convolutional decoder, a processor and memory. The convolutional decoder processes a received signal and provides a Yamamoto-Itoh (YI) metric to the processor. The processor (a) retrieves, from a look-up table stored in the memory, a compensation factor as a function of the YI metric value provided by the Viterbi decoder; (b) retrieves, from another look-up table stored in the memory, an initial BER estimate as a function of the YI metric; and (c) modifies the initial BER estimate with the retrieved compensation value to provide a BER estimate.