— The problem of non-cooperative power control is studied for wireless ad hoc networks supporting data services. We develop a maximum throughput based non-cooperative power control game (MT-NPG), where each transmitter node requires only the effective interference measurement from its corresponding receiver. An expression for the optimal power control to maximize the average transmission rate for each individual link is derived. Then, we design a distributed iterative power updating algorithm to approximate the optimal solution. The existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium for the proposed game is investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed MT-NPG yields a significant improvement in the sum of average achievable rates when compared with existing approaches.