Disclosed is a technique for mitigating the effect of an in-band interferer in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) wireless or wired networks that employ soft decision Viterbi decoder in the physical layer. The technique uses an independent estimation of the signal quality, which is passed to the Viterbi algorithm decoder so that it is able to discard the corrupted subcarriers. This improves the error correction capability of the Viterbi algorithm decoder in a receiver, which leads to fewer retransmissions and into higher information throughput.