A novel and improved method and apparatus for performing closed loop forward link power control using a selected dedicated and power controlled forward link signal is described. A “Selected Signal Bit Error Rate” (SSBER) is estimated, where each selected signal “bit” consists of a number selected signal chips distributed over a frame. In addition, the method estimates the normalized variance of the signal energy (or C/I) for each packet. The average number of fingers in lock is also used to determine the power control set point.