A system and method for reordering tones of a DMT signal within a communication system is described. Cross tone correlated noise in a received signal is identified and rearranged such that tones with correlated noise are spread out throughout the received signal before being processed by a decoder such as, Viterbi decoder (150). In an embodiment, two tones with the most correlated noise are placed at each end of the sequence of tones presented to the Viterbi decoder (150). In some embodiments, the tones with correlated noise can be spread such that two adjacent tones with correlated noise have a minimum distance of at least three tones between them at the input to the Viterbi decoder (150). In other embodiments, tones in the received signal can be processed in various kinds of interleavers for reordering according to the interleaver scheme.
