Coding method facilitating the reproduction as sound of digitized speech signals transmitted to a user terminal during a telephone call set up by transmitting packets, and equipment implementing the method

A coding method to facilitate the reproduction as sound of digitized speech signals transmitted to a user in a telecommunications system during a VOIP telephone call between the user terminals via a packet transmission network, in particular the Internet, the speech signals picked up by a terminal being coded digitally in accordance with a coding protocol which divides them temporally into a succession of segments of the same duration before converting them segment by segment into the form of packets which are transmitted via the transmission network to a destination terminal in which the packets are decoded using a decoding protocol complementary to the coding protocol to enable reproduction of the speech signals from reproduced signal segments, eliminating any packets transmitted twice and using a dissimulation algorithm for signal segments corresponding to missing packets, wherein segments of a succession being coded for transmission in the form of packets are analyzed to determine whether any segment is critical, i.e. likely not to be replaced effectively by a dissimulation algorithm in the destination terminal if the corresponding packet is missing, and/or whether it is to be considered as replaceable by a dissimulation algorithm in the destination terminal under the same conditions.