Systems and methods for data transport in optical communications systems, including a transmitter for encoding a received information sequence by constructing an outer and inner quasi cyclic-low-density parity check (QC-LDPC) code. The encoding includes dividing the received information sequence into a plurality of messages of equal length, encoding each of the messages into a codeword to generate a plurality of outer codewords, cascading the plurality of outer codewords to generate a bit sequence, and executing inner encoding to encode each of the plurality of outer codewords into codewords in QC-LDPC inner code. A receiver decodes a received data stream based on the QC-LDPC inner code using two-phase decoding including iteratively performing at least one of inner/outer and outer/inner decoding until a threshold condition is reached.