Welcome to the world of digital telecommunications! When you speak into a phone, your voice travels as a smooth, continuous analog wave. However, modern communication networks—from the internet to mobile networks—are digital. They speak a language of ones and zeros, or bits. To send your voice across these networks, it must first be translated, or “coded,” from an analog wave into a digital format.

The key challenge is to do this translation as efficiently as possible. Think of it like a ZIP file, but for human speech: the goal is to shrink the data size dramatically without losing call quality. To ensure that a phone in one country can understand a phone in another, global standards are created. These standards act as a universal translator, a shared set of rules that all devices can follow to compress and decompress voice data seamlessly.

Let’s begin by meeting the main organization responsible for creating this “common language.”