A receiver for a passive optical network is provided. The receiver includes an analog-to-digital converter circuitry configured generate a digital receive signal based on an analog receive signal. The analog receive signal is based on an optical receive signal encoded with a binary transmit sequence. The receiver additionally comprises linear equalizer circuitry configured to generate an equalized receive signal by linearly equalizing the digital receive signal. Further, the receiver comprises secondary equalizer circuitry configured to generate soft information indicating a respective reliability of elements in the equalized receive signal using the Viterbi algorithm. In addition, the receiver comprises decoder circuitry configured to generate a digital output signal based on the soft information using soft decision forward error correction.