Patent ID: 8498326

Claim:
A multi-tone transceiver with a plurality of components forming a transmit path and a receive path configured to couple via a subscriber line to an opposing multi-tone transceiver for frequency division multiplexed multi-tone modulated communications therewith; and the multi-tone transceiver comprising: a hybrid front end that couples the receive path to the subscriber line; a noise margin channel identifier component on the receive path configured to identify within a received tone set, discrete tones each associated with a corresponding one of at least two channels differing from one another in a relative noise margin of associated tones; and a Viterbi decoder component on the receive path coupled to the noise margin identifier component and responsive to the tone identification provided by the noise margin channel identifier component to discretely decode each of the corresponding at least two channels; thereby improving the fidelity of the error correction provided by the Viterbi decoder by discretely processing the identified tones within the received set of tones.