To communicate measurement data from a well, data corresponding to measurement data collected by multiple sensors in a well is transformed downhole and passed to an intermediate communications device, which device in turn passes a subset of that data to a destination communications device. The destination communications device applies a second transformation to the data received from the intermediate communications device. The first and second transformations are designed such that meaningful data can be recovered at the destination communications device even though only a subset of the original transformed data has been received.