Abstract: Outer loop power control (OLPC) method and apparatus for mobile communications systems which allow rapid adjustment of the target desired signal to interference ratio (SIRtarget) satisfying a target block error rate (BLERtarget). Specifically, the outer loop power control method proposed herein is termed “Outage-Based OLPC” and establishes that the target desired signal to interference ratio (SIRtarget) is given as the sum of two components: the first component (SIRoutage-tgt) is calculated by means of a dynamic adjusting function, for example, a neural network which makes a quality criterion based on outage probabilities correspond with one based on the target block error rate (BLERtarget), taking as input the fading margins associated with the different outage probabilities considered; the other component (SIRBLER-tgt) is that which acts to correct the possible deviations in the target block error rate (BLERtarget) due to the non-ideal behaviour of the previous component (SIRoutage-tgt).