In general, this invention concerns speech encoding and decoding used in digital radio systems and a method by which the processing capacity required can be reduced in a telecommunication system using discontinuous transmission between a transmitter and receiver. In particular, the method according to the invention is used to match two telecommunication systems using different encoding methods between the transmitter and receiver. In the method, the signals transmitted by the transmitter are made suitable for the receiver in the signal path so that in the first step, at least one information parameter comprising at least two content identifiers is formed for each data frame of the data parameters (101) received. In the next step, data corresponding to the original data is synthesized from the data parameters (101) of the received frames, after which the synthesized data is transmitted for recoding with an encoding method suitable for the receiver. In the final step, during recoding, at least some data parameters (107) of the frames are updated on the basis of at least one value of said content identifiers of the information parameter, and the frames to be transmitted to the receiver are selected from all the recoded data frames on the basis of the value of at least one other content identifier of the information parameter. In addition, the invention concerns a network element, which is arranged to implement the method described above.