Abstract Power control is of paramount important to combat the near-far problem and achieve high system capacity in CDMA cellular system. In this paper, a Modified Neural Network (MNN) based power controller is proposed to smoothen out the fast fading and keep the received signal power from each user constant at the base station. Simulation results show that MNN power controller achieves better control performance and system capacity than fixedstep controller due to the inherent ability of MNN to identify the fast time-varying characteristic of inverse channel.