Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The estimation of quality for real-time services over telecommunication netb4works requires realistic models for impairments and failures during transmission. We focus on the classical Gilbert-Elliott model whose second-order statistics is derived over arbitrary time-scales. The model is used to fit packet loss processes of backbone and DVB-H traffic traces. The results show that simple Markov models are appropriate to capture the observed loss pattern and to discuss how such models can be used to examine the quality degradations caused by packet losses