An optical channel between a coherent optical transmitter and a coherent optical receiver may include one or more components that act as a bandpass filter with a passband that is narrower than the signal bandwidth. Such a narrow filter may significantly attenuate the signal content close to the band edge of the data signal. As a result, timing error detection may work less effectively, and therefore clock recovery may be less effective or fail. Methods and systems are disclosed in which a single optical carrier is used to transmit a data signal that has multiple bands, and timing error detection is performed at the receiver using one or more inner bands of the multiple bands. The timing error detection may therefore be made more robust to the effects of the narrow filtering.