Teachings presented herein present a “whitening” channel estimation method and apparatus that produce high-quality net channel estimates for processing a received signal, such as a received CDMA signal. Processing includes forming an initial least squares problem (for medium channel estimates) using known pilot values and corresponding pilot observations for the received signal, transforming the initial least squares problem using a whitening transformation term, and solving the transformed least squares problem to obtain whitened medium channel estimates. The whitening transformation term may be determined, for example, by carrying out a Cholesky factorization of a (traffic) data correlation matrix, which can be obtained from traffic data values for the received signal. Processing further includes converting the whitened medium channel estimates into whitened net channel estimates, which consider the effects of transmit/receive filtering.