In a high-speed fiber-optic tranmission system, data streams are synchronized using fixed stuffing before being multiplexed for transmission. The fixed stuffing information is replaced with forward error correction (FEC) information, whereby FEC is effected without any increase in transmission speed. FEC information blocks of each data stream can be synchronized to the frame timing of the transmission system, or they can be relatively unsynchronized. In the latter case, an FEC decoder acts in a self-framing manner to synchronize itself to the FEC information blocks of the respective data stream.