Economist.com | Coding theory

Turbo coding, as the first of the new techniques to come on stream is known, was invented by Alain Glavieux and Claude Berrou, two researchers at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne in Brest, France. It is now being deployed in third-generation (3G) mobile-telephone networks, and will allow wireless access from 3G phones to be over ten times faster than from an old-fashioned dial-up line.