In this paper a different view on Viterbi's method for the estimation of the reverse link capacity of a single cell of CDMA based mobile communications systems is given. Viterbi's approach is well-known and of great importance for the capacity estimation. However, the interpretation of Viterbi's result on the system capacity is not that clear. Thus, we introduce a new approach giving accurate reasons for Viterbi's capacity estimation. When neglecting the noise power, both methods provide nearly the same result. We conclude that Viterbi's finding relates to the average capacity, which is an important statistical parameter. However, we should note that this average capacity will be not available all the time. The improvements discussed in this paper focus on the specification of a certain reliability about the availability of the average capacity.