A method and a system for providing ISI compensation to an input signal in a bifurcated manner. ISI compensation is provided in two stages, a first stage compensates ISI components induced by characteristics of a transmitter's partial response pulse shaping filter, a second stage compensates ISI components induced by characteristics of a multi-pair transmission channel. First stage ISI compensation is performed in an inverse response filter having a characteristic feedback gain factor K, during system start-up. Second stage ISI compensation is performed by a single DFE in combination with a MDFE operating on tentative decisions output from a Viterbi decoder. As the DFE of the second stage reaches convergence, the feedback gain factor K of the first stage is ramped to zero.