Speech coding is about bit rate reduction of digitized speech, and telecommunications is about transmission of coded speech (and, of course, transmission of video, audio, data etc. - but speech is still by far the most important payload in telecommunication networks). Speech coding and signal processing was very well covered when I was a research engineer at the University of Kiel, but telecommunications were somehow missing. So I went into telecommunications and joined Nokia in 1998.
While writing embedded software and creating concepts for telecommunication network elements I learned a lot about this:
And continuous learning still goes on ...
Some more articles will follow soon!