An apparatus and method of applying a superfast algorithm to a pilot-based channel estimation process includes receiving a signal comprising information bits transmitted in a wireless channel, executing the pilot-based channel estimation process having p structures for a vector of pilot structures and an upper bound N for a channel spread, determining a result of a matrix inversion of a channel correlation matrix for an error channel estimation offline without performing a matrix inversion, storing pilot information of the received signal for channel recovery in a transform domain, representing the Toeplitz inverse by a FFT representation, detecting and estimating nonzero taps of a channel impulse response of the wireless channel, obtaining a non-structured minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) estimate as a first estimate of locations of the nonzero taps, and replacing the non-structured MMSE estimate by an estimate computed by a tap detection algorithm.