A new computationally efficient channel shortening technique, to make the OFDM systems robust for delay spreads exceeding the cyclic prefix is presented. The proposed technique gives same BER performance with shorter equalizer. The method is based on pole-zero modeling of the channel impulse response. This gives low computational complexity, both during initialization and data transmission. Moreover no delay search is required as compared with other methods. IEEE 802.11a is considered as underlying OFDM system. ©2007 IEEE.