In a wireless communications system, a serving base station performs outer and closed power control for an overhead channel and a traffic channel for data, either of which can carry an acknowledgement (Ack) channel and Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) channel on an uplink from User Equipment (UE). In an exemplary aspect, data packet communication is implemented in 3GPP LTE Rel. 8 wherein the uplink has a Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiplex (SC-FDM) uplink waveform. The UE performs open loop power control by a determining transmit power spectral density value by using received energy per symbol for a reference signal.