Transceivers and methods able to recover within less than 1 millisecond from quality degradation in the transceiver's operating point, including: receiving a signal from a second transceiver, using an adaptive digital equalizer and canceller (ADEC) to generate a slicer input signal, and generating slicing decisions and slicing errors that are used to adapt the ADEC. Shortly after identifying quality degradation in the transceiver's operating point, indicating the second transceiver to transmitting known data. And within less than 1 millisecond from identifying the quality degradation, the transceiver utilizes the known data to improve the accuracy of the slicing errors, which enables fast adaptation of the ADEC that improves the quality in the transceiver's operating point to a level that enables the transceiver to indicate the second transceiver to transmit data.