In this paper we study a simplified linear precoding scheme for FEXT cancellation in VDSL downstream transmission. We compare the proposed method to ideal zero forcing (ZF) FEXT cancellation and show that for multipair VDSL systems the method achieves rates that are close to the optimal theoretical rates without FEXT. We also derive a simple lower bound on the performance that allows us to predict the performance of the proposed algorithm. We end up with testing the proposed method on theoretical and empirical channels