In a digital communications system 100 as illustrated in FIG. 1, a stream of information bits 112 is transferred from one point to another through a communication channel 130 and is therefore susceptible to noise 132. Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques improve the channel capacity by carefully adding redundant information to the data being transmitted 110 through the channel 130. In a FEC system, the transmitted data is encoded in such a way so that the receiver 120 can correct, as well as detect, errors caused by channel noise 132. Convolutional encoding 111 with Viterbi decoding 121 is a FEC technique that is well suited for such communication systems. The convolutional encoder 111 inserts redundant information bits into the data stream 112 so that the decoder 121 can reduce and correct errors caused by the channel 130. In today's communication networks there is a steady need for further improvement of the coding sensitivity.