A high speed transceiver operable to receive lower data rate transmissions includes an oversampling module and a data recovery system. The oversampling module is operably coupled to oversample a unique alignment sequence and data of a data stream received at a first data transmission to produce an oversampled unique alignment sequence and oversampled data, respectively, wherein the first data transmission rate is less than a serial bit rate of the high speed transceiver. The data recovery system is operably coupled to: compare a portion of the oversampled unique alignment sequence with an expected oversampled partial alignment sequence; when the comparing the portion of the oversampled unique alignment sequence with the expected oversampled partial alignment sequence is favorable, determine one of a plurality of word alignments for the data stream based on the portion of the oversampled unique alignment sequence; and recover aligned data at the first data transmission rate from the oversampled data based on the one of the plurality of word alignments.