The global communication systems critically rely on control algorithms of various kinds. In universal mobile telephony system (UMTS)-the third generation mobile telephony system just being launched-power control algorithms play an important role for efficient resource utilization. This survey article describes and discusses relevant aspects of UMTS power control with emphasis on practical issues, using an automatic control framework. Generally, power control of each connection is distributedly implemented as cascade control, with an inner loop to compensate for fast variations and an outer loop focusing on longer term statistics. These control loops are interrelated via complex connections, which affect important issues such as capacity, load and stability. Therefore, both local and global properties are important. The concepts and algorithms are illustrated by simple examples and simulations.