In a flexible layer one (403) of a GERAN transmitter device, a TFCI, which indicates a particular combination of cyclic redundancy check, channel coding and rate matching, is generated by a TFCI generating process (412) using information from the medium access control layer. The TFCI is coded by a coding process (413), and inserted into the data stream by a TFCI insertion process (414). Each code has more bits than the corresponding TFCI, and identifies uniquely the TFCI. The coded TFCI is spread across the pre-interleaved block with portions placed in fixed positions in each burst. Interleaving is then performed by an interleaver (411). The coded TFCI used with a half-rate channel is the central segment of the coded TFCI used in the corresponding full-rate channel. The additional loss is so small as to be insignificant, but the FER performance is significantly improved, compared to using the full-rate codes, as a result of the increased payload of the content data bits. In half-rate mode, the amount of coded TFCI data gives rise to a ratio of the performance of the coding of the transport format combination data to the performance of the coded content data which is at a similar level to the ratio in the full-rate mode.