The IS-856 standard provides bandwidth-efficient and high-speed wireless internet services to mobile subscribers. It can provide a maximum data rate of 2.4 Mbps on the forward link and 153.6 kbps on the reverse link by adopting advanced techniques. On the reverse link, there is a distributed rate control algorithm, which is based on a probabilistic model. Each mobile determines its data rate at the beginning of a new frame using a reverse activity bit and persistence probabilities. In this paper, the performance of the rate control is analyzed by modeling it as a Markov process. The results show that there is a trade-off between the reverse link throughput and the outage probability. In addition, the performance of the rate control is highly dependent on system parameters of IS-856.