Method for optimizing mobile wireless communications routed across plural interconnected networks

A telecommunication system routes real-time information traffic from an originating digital radio unit served by an originating network to a terminating unit served by a terminating network via an intermediate network interconnecting the originating and terminating networks. The originating digital radio unit has an encoder/decoder (e.g., a vocoder) for generating digital wireless frames from information that is input thereto. The originating network includes an originating node with an encoder/decoder for performing wireless-specific conversion of the digital wireless frames to digital wireline (e.g., PCM) traffic. The intermediate network includes an originating-end interface node with an encoder/decoder for compressing the digital wireline traffic for transport across the intermediate network. Optimization of communications routed between the originating and terminating units is achieved by routing the digital wireless frames without wireless-specific conversion being performed at the originating node of the originating network nor compression conversion being performed at the originating-end interface node of the intermediate network, such that the rate of information traffic throughput is maximized.