Systems and methods are provided for multi-channel ITU G.709 optical transport network (OTN) transmission and receiving. The transmission method accepts a canonical ITU G.709 OTN frame including an OTU overhead (OH) section, an ODU section, and a forward error correction (FEC) parity section. A training signal wrapper is added to the ITU G.709 OTN frame, and at least a portion of a training-enhanced (TE) OTN frame is buffered in a tangible memory medium in preparation for striping. The method stripes the training-enhanced OTN frame into n parallel streams to supply n TE_OTN-PFs (Parallel Frames) at an output.