Abstract: Interference pre-cancellation is a fundamental coding technique for multi-terminal networks and many classic information theoretic results rely on this strategy. Despite this, implementations of this coding scheme have yet to find widespread application in practical communication networks and one is bound to wonder as of why this is the case. In this talk we argue that interference pre-cancellation is effective only when very precise channel estimates are available at the users, a condition which is not easily attainable in many communication networks. The ability of a transmitter to pre-cancel the interference experienced at the receiver is drastically reduced when only partial side channel information is available. For this reason, we investigate the topic of robust interference cancellation and show that substantial coding advantages can be attained only when exploiting the structure of the interfering signal.