The present disclosure is directed to a system and method for continually adapting a channel equalizer that includes a precoder based on changing channel conditions. The precoder is described as being implemented in the exemplary context of a 10GBASE-T physical layer (PHY) device. 10GBASE-T is defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3an standard and uses four pairs of copper transmission lines to provide an aggregate data rate of 10 gigabits per second. In this exemplary context, the system and method of the present disclosure are configured to exploit an undefined, auxiliary bit in the 10GBASE-T transmission frame to continually send updates to the coefficients of the precoder based on changing channel conditions. The updates can be sent in the transmission frames together with application-level data.