db and 2 db steps in a method in accordance with the present invention the bs 100 considers the received power control commands in pairs for use during soft handover it is advantageous for these groups to be aligned to either an odd or even numbered frame boundary since a frame includes an odd number 15 of timeslots the definition of an even or odd frame can be determined from a connection frame number or system frame number such alignment ensures that different bss 100 in the active set which are executing an emulation algorithm in accordance with the present invention behave in a similar way in the first timeslot of each pair the bs 100 always implements a power step of 1 db in the direction given by the sign of the received power control command where the sign is considered to be negative if the received command is 0 and positive if the received command is 1 in the second timeslot the bs 100 implements a power step of 2 db if the received power control command is of the same sign as that received in the first slot or a power step of magnitude 1 db if the signs are opposite if a bs 100 only implements 1 db steps more than one 1 db step could be performed in a single timeslot if a larger step size is required by the emulation algorithm the resultant power changes are the above method can be generalised to handle the case of emulating step sizes equal to x 0 5 db where the bs 100 can implement steps of x db and x 1 db by having the power step in the first timeslot of x db and the power step in the second timeslot of x db or.