Method and system for providing seamless match point switching in an adaptive decoder (e.g., an MLSE decoder) that is based on estimation of symbol sequences, according to which statistics regarding samples corresponding to different symbol sequences in alternative match points are collected by a statistics collector, to create a set of figures of merit representing the quality of each alternative match point, while different match points are obtained by changing the delay of symbols decoded by the adaptive decoder and samples entering the statistics collector. A figure of merit of the current match point is compared to the figure of merit of alternative match points. Whenever an alternative match point figure of merit is better than the current match point by a predefined threshold, a decision to switch to the alternative match point is made. Seamless switching to the alternative match point is performed by shifting the sampling phase forward or backward, until obtaining better performance, while performing adaptation of the decoder to the sampling phase shift.

A method and apparatus for performing residual phase noise compensation is described. A coarse carrier compensation of a received modulated signal is performed to obtain a coarse carrier compensated signal and a trellis-based residual carrier recovery is performed to estimate a residual phase noise of the coarse carrier compensated signal. The coarse carrier compensated signal is compensated based on the estimated residual phase noise.