Particularly in wireless communications, link errors severely affect the quality of the services due to the high error probability and the specific error characteristics (burst errors) in the radio access part of the network. In this work, we show that thorough analysis and appropriate modeling of radio-link error behavior are essential to evaluate and optimize higher layer protocols and services. They are also the basis for finding network-aware cross-layer processing algorithms which are capable of exploiting the specific properties of the link error statistics, such as predictability. This document presents the analysis of the radio link errors based on measurements in live Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) radio access networks as well as new link error models originating from that analysis. It is shown that the knowledge of the specific link error characteristics leads to significant improvements in the quality of streamed video by applying the proposed novel network- and content-aware cross-layer scheduling algorithms. Although based on live UMTS network experience, many of the conclusions in this work are of general validity and are not limited to UMTS only.