The claimed subject matter relates to encoding and decoding information in a wireless communication system using soft-demodulation and interleaving of concatenated code received in a strip channel. A set of symbols is received containing a plurality of information bits, dividing the received set of symbols into a plurality of subsets of symbols, each subset corresponding to the input of an inner code demodulation selecting a set of initial a priori values of the inner code demodulation for each subset of symbols, and demodulating each subset of symbols, using the initial a priori values of the subset of symbols and an inner code generator matrix, to generate a plurality of first soft information values as the output of the inner code demodulation.