The present invention provides linear MMSE equalization with parallel interference cancellation for symbol determination in a forward link of a CDMA communication system which has a plurality of code channels in use. Use of the linear MMSE equalization with parallel interference cancellation of the present invention provides significantly increased performance. The preferred method linearly filters a received signal to form a first filtered signal (410), despreads and demodulates the first filtered signal (415, 420) and provides a plurality of symbol estimates for all corresponding code channels (430). An estimated transmitted signal is generated from the plurality of symbol estimates (435), and with a channel estimate (405), an estimated received signal is generated (440). A residual signal is determined as a difference between the received signal and the estimated received signal, is linearly filtered (445), and then combined with the estimated transmitted signal to form a next, enhanced estimated transmitted signal (450). This next estimated transmitted signal is despread (455, 460) and utilized to provide a next plurality of symbol estimates, for a selected code channel of the plurality of channels, for subsequent use in error correction and decoding, and further use by a subscriber (465, 475).