For the design of networked control systems, we employ a subband coding technique to efficiently use the available data rate. Such coding schemes have widely been used in signal processing for data compression. We take an approach suitable from the control perspective in that frequency characteristics of a controller are directly used. In particular, we propose a three-step design procedure for the overall controller having the following features: On the coder side, it uses a controller consisting of a filter bank whose outputs are subband signals of the control input. On the decoder side is another filter bank for reconstruction of the subband signals. This decoder is capable to account for random message losses that occur in communication and is designed via an H-infinity-type method. For the quantizers in the coder, an efficient bit allocation scheme is also developed. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.