Initial ranging constitutes a part of the synchronization procedure employed by the wireless communication standards. This allows the base station (BS) to detect the subscriber stations (SS) that are willing to commence communication. In addition, the ranging process allows the BS to estimate the uplink channel parameters of these SSs. Accurate estimation of these parameters are crucial as they ensure that the uplink signals from all the SSs arrive at the BS synchronously and approximately at the same power level. However, this detection and estimation problem turns out to be very challenging when multiple users initiate the ranging procedure at the same time. We address this issue by exploiting the underlying sparsity of the estimation problem. We propose a fast sparse signal recovery approach to improve the ranging performance in multi-user environment. Compared to the standard correlation based techniques, our method shows a clear improvement in ranging code detection, timing offset and channel power estimation. Although this method has been developed around the WiMAX standard, the underlying principles apply to other OFDM based standards as well.