An optical transceiver is disclosed. The transceiver includes a receiver having adaptive electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) circuitry on at least one optical channel. The adaptive electronic dispersion compensation circuitry provides diagnostics information to a host system. The transceiver can be an XFP, X2, XENPAK, SFP, SFF, GBIC or other type of transceiver. The diagnostics information can include information on the time variation of a quality of the optical channel and/or a measure of a worst state of the optical channel over a period of time. The diagnostics information can also be derived from a measure of a quality of an equalized receiver signal, a current tap weight value, and many other specific values.