Systems and methods are provided for multi-channel ITU G.709 optical transport network (OTN) communications. The transmission method accepts an ITU G.709 OTN frame including an OTU overhead (OH) section and an ODU section. A forward error correction (FEC) parity section with a training signal is appended to the ITU G.709 OTN frame, to create a training-enhanced (TE) OTN frame. All, or a portion of the TE OTN may be buffered in a tangible memory medium in preparation for striping. The training-enhanced OTN frame is then striped into n parallel streams, and n TE_OTN-PFs (Parallel Frames) are supplied.