Erasure FEC decoder and method

Disclosed is a method and erasure FEC decoder for correcting a pattern of errors by a two-dimensional decoding, the pattern of errors comprising at least two codewords in both a first and a second dimensions with a number of errors in common higher than the capacity of the code which is used for decoding. The method comprises the steps of: performing a full capacity decoding along the second dimension for removing possible false corrections introduced by a previous decoding performed along the first dimension; performing a reduced-capacity decoding along the first dimension, for identifying errored codewords along the first dimension; performing a full capacity decoding along the second dimension with disabled correction feature for identifying errored codewords along the second dimension; detecting the error coordinates from the information from steps b) and c); and correcting the detected pattern of errors.