The disclosure relates to a method of globally balancing the transmit power in a cellular radio system with tight reuse of frequencies, to a central controller node, and to an access point that in combination with conventional power control schemes balances the downlink transmission power on re-used frequencies in order to balance co-channel interference in a multi-cell environment. The power balancing scheme takes the instantaneous channel variation and co-channel interference into account and satisfies the throughput requirements of the different cells when allocating downlink power to the user equipments. Global power balancing dynamically assigns a token to or takes a token away from an individual reused radio channel based on quality of, or based on transmission power in the channel. The balancing of transmission power, along with the conventional power scheme, prevents a global increase or global decrease of interference in the multi-cellular system.