A system is described that comprises a frequency domain impulse noise detector configured to monitor received discrete multi-tone (DMT) symbols for impulse noise, a Reed Solomon (RS) decoder with erasure and erasure correction capability for performing error correction on received DMT symbols, and an optimization module configured to adjust parameters associated with the impulse noise detector, the optimization module configured to adjust values for βpivot, βc, and a ratio (m/M), wherein M is a number of monitored tones, m is a number of slicer error samples that must exceed a decision threshold for a symbol to be flagged as corrupted, and βpivot and βc are values associated with a monotonic function of a ratio of a statistical parameter of disruptive noise to a statistical parameter of nominal noise.