Acoustic echo cancellation for teleconferencing or hands‐free telephony constitutes a challenging task for today's digital signal processing techniques. Compared to the well‐established line echo cancellation in telephone networks, the problem takes on a considerably larger size: The impulse response of the echo path to be compensated is longer and may vary more rapidly in time. Moreover, larger bandwidths are often desirable. Therefore, acoustic echo cancellation requires algorithms that adapt far more coeffecients and converge faster than those commonly used in line echo cancelers. On the other hand, direct implementation of sufficiently advanced adaptive filtering algorithms is usually prohibited because of their computational complexity and inherent numerical difficulties. As a way out, the subband approach realizes a “divide and conquer” strategy and promises a reduction of computational complexity and favorable circumstances for fast convergence at the cost of some extra delay. After comparing several possible subband structures, the frequency subband structure is discussed in some detail. For adaptation using LMS‐type algorithms, reasons for the improved convergence behavior compared to a fullband implementation are explained. Design examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.