This paper presents a method of speaker identification over telephone system based on channel‐effect cancellation. A set of inverse channel spectra is chosen as the basis for generating a channel‐effect‐cancellation filter. The speaker identification scheme is based on vector quantization where the codebooks of each speaker are trained without channel effect. When the speech signal of a speaker goes through the telephone system, a proper channel‐effect‐cancellation filter is generated to minimize the channel effect on the speech signal. The experiments show that the channel effect is mostly contributed by telephone handsets rather than by the transmission lines. By using the proposed method, an identification rate of 93.8% can be achieved for 100 speaker tests.