Comment by roboman

I worked on forward error correcting codes for a variety of systems.

A few big issues with Turbo codes: 1. Decoder complexity - often 4x or more the complexity of simpler codes.

2. Encoder delay- you need to have a really long interleaver at the transmitter to get the big dB of improvements.

3. These work best an pure additive white gaussian noise channels - most channels suffer from multipath, fading and other disturbances.

So while they are good far satellite broadcast system they don't always work as well in other applications.