Methods and apparatus are described for improving the transmission of information over wireless communication channels. These techniques include determining available communication channels for transmitting information and determining possible physical layer packet sizes of the available channels. An information unit is partitioned into portions wherein the size of the portions are selected so as to match one of the physical layer packet sizes of the available communication channels. Another aspect is partitioning the information into a number of slices that correspond to the number of transmissions that occur during the information unit interval and assigning each partition to a corresponding transmission. The techniques can be used for various types of information, such as multimedia data, variable bit rate data streams, video data, or audio data. The techniques can also be used with various over the air interfaces, such as, Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Enhanced Data GSM Environment (EDGE), or standards based on CDMA such as TIA/EIA-95-B (IS-95), TIA/EIA-98-C (IS-98), IS2000, HRPD, cdma2000, Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), and others.