The invention is a CDMA system which achieves improved performance by virtue of being adaptive to the speed of each mobile unit in the system. A speed estimator for each mobile unit can be located in the mobile unit itself and/or in the base station. The speed estimate is used to modify a variety of parameters within processing fingers in the mobile unit and in the base station, including the accumulation period of certain accumulators and the time constant for loop filters. The speed estimate also influences assignment, by a control unit, of path delays to respective processing fingers for despreading. Furthermore, the speed estimate is used by the control unit to decide whether or not finger outputs are to be combined by a diversity combiner in the receiver. In addition, the speed estimate is used to optimize the closed-loop power control target and the energy of a transmitted pilot. The speed estimate is also used for allocation of pooled finger and searcher resources, as well as data transmission rate negotiation and interleaver/deinterleaver length configuration.