Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communication systems are expected to satisfy the thirst for ever increasing demand on higher spectral efficiency. But, OFDM systems suffer from peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and inter carrier interference (ICI) problems. It is observed that when OFDM is used in the uplink, PAPR problem is more severe and the relative mobility of the user equipments with respect to the base station will cause Doppler spread which leads to ICI. One of the solutions to minimize PAPR and ICI is single carrier frequency division multiple access. But there is a tradeoff in spectral efficiency. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of fractionally spaced equalizer (FSE) for blind channel estimation based on higher order statistics and to identify any better alternative to improve its performance. Dynamically varying modulus algorithm (DVMA) based FSE is proposed in this paper which is a better alternative for supervised equalization. The simulation results prove that FSE blind equalizer based on DVMA outperform the conventional supervised and blind equalizers. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.