A method and apparatus is disclosed herein for forward-backward SOMA techniques. In one embodiment, the apparatus is a receiver comprising: an inner decoder structure having a soft output M-algorithm (SOMA) based multiple-in multiple-out (MIMO) joint demapper that uses a SOMA-based MIMO detection process to perform joint inner demapping over each tone, where the SOMA-based MIMO joint demapper is operable to identify a best candidate among a number of candidates by searching a detection tree for each tone using a forward pass through the detection tree, where only a number of best alternatives from every level of the tree are expanded and where soft-output related information is collected and stored, and to perform a second pass, following the forward pass, during which soft-output is computed for each bit; and an outer decoder operable with the SOMA-based inner decoder to perform iterative decoding.