Subband index carrierless amplitude and phase modulation (SI-CAP) is proposed and investigated in this work to improve the performance of multi-band CAP (m-CAP). The bit-error-rate (BER) analysis of the proposed SI-CAP is derived and verified through computer simulations. A detection scheme is also developed for SI-CAP which achieves maximum likelihood (ML) performance at a significantly lower complexity. In addition, an experimental demonstration of the proposed SI-CAP is carried out for optical communication systems. Furthermore, adaptive equalization technique is implemented to further enhance the performance gain of SI-CAP. It is shown that for the same order of complexity, the SI-CAP exhibits higher spectral and energy efficiency in comparison to m-CAP. Therefore, the performance gain of SI-CAP along with its design flexibility make it a suitable candidate for optical communication systems. Index Terms-Multi-band carrierless amplitude and phase modulation (m-CAP), optical communication, visible light communication (VLC), index modulation (IM), step-index plastic optical fibre (SI-POF), adaptive equalization. I. INTRODUCTION There is an ever increasing demand for high speed data connection due to unprecedented growth in broadband communication and the expected ubiquitous connectivity of smart devices. This demand requires communication technologies that can support the existing overcrowded radio frequency (RF) communication to meet the future data traffic. Optical communication is one of such techniques as it offers huge spectrum with low cost devices [1]. Step-index plastic optical fibre (SI-POF) has received high interest in optical communication due to its low cost, ease of installation and resilience to electromagnetic interference [2]. In addition, visible light communication (VLC) has become an emerging technology in the field of optical wireless communication (OWC) [3]. The VLC can leverage existing lighting fixtures for data communication and its benefits include the use of low-cost devices, availability of huge spectrum and high security, among others [3], [4]. The commercially available white light emitting diodes (LEDs) that are predominantly employed for illumination and VLC have small modulation bandwidth and creates a bottleneck in achieving high data rate. Furthermore, high data rate transmission over SI-POF results in inter-symbol interference (ISI) due to its limited bandwidth-length product, typically 45 MHz × 100 m.