The present invention relates to speech coding in wireless and wireline communication systems. The present invention provides a method of saving bandwidth by a controlled dropping of speech frames at an encoder in a sending communication device. The dropping is controlled in a manner to minimize the effects on the speech quality after the decoding in the receiving communication device, by assuring that the state mismatch between the encoder and the decoder is removed or at least significantly reduced. This is achieved by letting the encoder run an ECU algorithm with a similar behavior as the one running in the decoder in the receiving communication device.