A Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) receiver (630), operating in conjunction with a transmitter (606) receives a sequence of voice packets representing a speech utterance transmitted over a VOIP wireless interface (112). A receive packet buffer (120) buffers the received sequence of voice packets after receipt and before playback of reconstructed speech. A processor (650), operating under program control, determines a transmission buffer (108) delay of a first packet in the sequence of packets representing the speech utterance. The control processor (650) further sets a prescribed amount of delay in the receive packet buffer (120) based upon the transmission buffer (108) delay so that the transmission buffer delay+receive buffer delay=a predetermined total delay. The status of the receiver buffer (120) is monitored and tracked by or fed back to the transmitter side to minimize receive buffer (120) under-runs by use of CDMA soft capacity (200), link dependent prioritization (300), real-time packet prioritization (400) and/or variation of vocoder (624) rates (500).