Techniques are provided to control the transmit power for data transmission on multiple transport channels having different signal quality (SIR) targets. A single SIR target is maintained for all transport channels, and this SIR target is adjusted based only on active transport channels. For each update interval, a data processor processes at least one data block received in the current update interval on at least one of the transport channels and provides the status of each received data block. A controller increases the SIR target based on an up step if any received data block is erased and decreases the SIR target based on a down step if all received data blocks are good. If any received data block is erased, the down step used to adjust the SIR target may be set to the smallest down step size required by all transport channels with erased data blocks.