An alternative scheme, named frequency spreading filter bank multicarrier (FS-FBMC), is introduced for multicarrier transmission. It is based on the FFT and closely follows the principle of OFDM, while preserving the key advantages of FBMC, namely the absence of guard time and the spectral separation of the sub-channels. It is optimal in the sense that it can provide perfect equalization of the transmission channel without the need for an additional delay and it maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio in the receiver. It generalizes the classical FFT-PPN approach, which, in fact, is a technique to remove some redundancy in the computations.