1. An apparatus for processing telecommunication signals, the apparatus being adapted to perform a frame classification process and a rate determination process associated with a bitstream representing one or more frames of data encoded according to a first voice compression standard from a bitstream representing one or more frames of data according to a second compression standard or associated with a bitstream representing one or more frames of data encoded according to a first mode to a bitstream representing one or more frames of data according to a second mode within a single voice compression standard, the apparatus comprising: a source bitstream unpacker, the source bitstream unpacker being adapted to separate a voice code from a source codec into one or more separate codes representing one or more speech parameters and being adapted to generate one or more parameters for input into the frame classification and rate determination process; more than one parameters buffers coupled to the source bitstream unpacker, the one or more parameters buffers being adapted to store the one or more input parameters and one or more output parameters of the frame classification and rate determination process from the one or more bitstream frames; a frame classification and rate determination module coupled to the more than one parameters buffers, the frame classification and rate determination module being adapted to input one or more of selected classification input parameters, the frame classification and rate determination module being adapted to output a frame class, a rate decision and one or more classification feature parameters.