Methods and systems for fast recovery, such as a transceiver that assists a second transceiver to recover rapidly from quality degradation. In one embodiment, the transceiver includes a receiver and a transmitter. The receiver receives from the second transceiver an indication to transmit known data, wherein utilizing the known data enables the second transceiver to recover within less than 1 millisecond from the quality degradation. And the transmitter transmits the known data, wherein the known data comprises bitwise complement code words of an idle sequence, and each bitwise complement code word appears in the idle sequence.