In third generation mobile networks, transmission rates can be assigned to both real time and non real time applications. We address in this paper the question of how to allocate transmission rates in a manner that is both optimal and fair. As optimality criterion we use the Pareto optimality notion, and as fairness criterion we use a general concept of which the max-min fairness (which is the standardized fairness concept in ATM networks) and the proportional fairness (which characterizes fairness obtained by some transport protocols for the Internet) are special cases.We show that the problem is a joint optimization system of the transmission rate and the power. We formulate the fair allocation problem as an optimization problem and propose both exact as well as approximating solutions. We consider both uplink and downlink problems and study also macrodiversity.