The complex dynamics of intracellular calcium regulates cellular responses to information encoded in extracellular signals. Here we study the encoding of these external signals in the context of the Li-Rinzel model. We show that by control of biophysical parameters the information can be encoded in amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM), or mixed (AM and FM) modulation. We briefly discuss the possible implications of this role of information encoding for astrocytes.