A method and corresponding equipment by which a wireless terminal communicatively coupled to a radio access network adapts to gating in respect to a downlink signal from a radio access network carrying power control commands (e.g. the F-DPCH of UTRAN with WCDMA), including gating by the radio access network of either just the power control commands or the channel itself, or gating of reception of the power control commands by the user equipment. The adaptation can include changing values of parameters used in determining when the wireless terminal declares a radio link failure, or instead only changing the procedures used to determine whether a parameter value has been achieved and thus only effectively changing the parameter values (or one or more of the parameters can be actually and effectively changed).