In one embodiment of the method of adaptively selecting an airlink coding scheme in a telecommunications network, a coding scheme operating region is determined based on a currently used coding scheme and measurements representative of a block error rate. A block error coding scheme is determined based on the determined coding scheme operating region. In another embodiment of the method of adaptively selecting an airlink coding scheme in a telecommunications network, a first coding scheme is determined based on measurements representative of one or more conditional channel quality metrics, and a second coding scheme is determined based on measurements representative of a block error rate. One of the first and second coding schemes is selected as the coding scheme.