In this paper, a linear adaptive least mean square (LMS) fractionally spaced equalizer (FSE) is proposed to jointly mitigate the severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) and timing jitter encountered by carrierless amplitude and phase modulation (CAP) in visible light communication (VLC) systems. The performance of FSE is compared to that of its counterpart, the symbol spaced equalizer (SSE), at the forward error control (FEC) bit error rate (BER) limit. It is shown that at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 20 dB and FEC BER limit of 3 × 10−3, FSE is able to achieve a bit rate of 95 Mb/s (spectral efficiency η of 14.6 bits/s/Hz) while only 30 Mb/s (η of 4.6 bits/s/Hz) is possible with SSE using CAP-64. It is observed that the FSE performance is insensitive to timing jitter while SSE performance suffers severe degradation. The results therefore indicate that FSE is better suited for CAP-based VLC systems than the widely used SSE.