This paper is concerned with control of stochastic systems subject to finite communication channel capacity. Necessary conditions for reconstruction and stability of system outputs are derived using the Information Transmission theorem and the Shannon lower bound. These conditions are expressed in terms of the Shannon entropy rate and the distortion measure employed to describe reconstruction and stability. The methodology is general, and hence it is applicable to a variety of systems. The results are applied to linear partially observed stochastic Gaussian controlled systems, when the channel is an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. For such systems and channels, sufficient conditions are also derived by first showing that the Shannon lower bound is exactly equal to the rate distortion function, and then designing the encoder, decoder and controller which achieve the capacity of the channel. The conditions imposed are the standard detectability and stabilizability of Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) theory, while a separation principle is shown between the design of the control and communication systems, without assuming knowledge of the control sequence at the encoder/decoder. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.