The Department of Communications Engineering, at the Bilbao Faculty of Engineering, is composed of 90 researchers and professors (30 of them are non permanent researchers). Except for a few exceptions all the professors with the department are PhDs.
The Department is in charge of courses belonging to Signal Processing, Communications, Computer Networks and Telematics. The Department provides the core of courses associated to the Telecommunications Engineering Master Degree. The Department also leads the PhD program in "Information Technologies and Communications in Mobile Networks - TICRM". This PhD training program is a joint initiative of five Spanish Universities and has been awarded continuously since 2003 with different Quality Labels by the Ministry of Education. The award is given after independent audit of contributions from researchers and PhD dissertations under the umbrella of the program.  In addition, the Department participates to the PhD program "Electronics and Telecommunications", an inter –department program since 2014.

The activity of the Department focuses on the Information Technologies. The research projects range from European to regionally funded calls, mostly in cooperation with other universities and companies from Spain and abroad.

The Department has training labs furnished with the appropriate professional equipment and is used by all courses dealing with signal processing, Radiocommunications, Access Networks, and Core backbones, including both cabled and wireless systems. These training labs are complementary to those research infrastructure areas associated to the research group s of the Department.