1. A method for carrier phase recovery of a carrier wave, the method comprising: receiving a carrier wave that was modulated at a signaling rate with a plurality of digital signals; generating a first estimate of the carrier wave's phase angle using eighth-order statistics (EOS) comprising dividing the digital signal into M number of blocks, wherein M does not exceed 10, performing signal decimation on each of the M number of blocks by lowering the symbol sequences by an integer factor N to form a new signal sequence in each of the M number of blocks, performing EOS blind phase recovery estimation on each of the new signal sequences; and generating a second estimate of the carrier wave's phase angle comprising performing a maximum likelihood estimate based at least in part on the first estimate.