The present disclosure is directed to systems for achieving speeds up to, and beyond, twice the conventional 10 Gbps limit associated with Backplane Ethernet systems. In one example, the system is a transmitter that includes a FEC encoder configured to generate and append redundant symbols to the input data stream to provide a FEC encoded data stream, a serial-to-parallel module configured to de-serialize the FEC encoded data stream and distribute the FEC encoded data stream over parallel FEC encoded data streams with at least one of the redundant symbols generated by the FEC encoder generated based on data sent over two or more of the parallel FEC encoded data streams, and a line code encoder configured to modulate one of the parallel FEC encoded data streams.