Embodiments of the invention provide embodiments of the invention provide and method, network entity and user equipment for slow uplink power control of user equipment in a wireless communication system by responding to a long term control metric that is derived from an uplink channel metric over a plurality of transmission instances and a set of performance criteria. A method for slow uplink power control in accordance with and embodiment of the invention measures at least one uplink channel metric for user equipment and then determines an appropriate transmit power for the user equipment by using a control metric derived from the uplink channel metric corresponding to a plurality of transmission instances for the user equipment.