In recent years, with the development of different types of new energy sources, cross-area power systems (CAPS), whose purpose is to maintain reasonable distribution and power sharing among different areas, have gained great attention. In this paper, aimed at CAPS with random delay and packet dropouts in the process of data transmission, a novel wide-area stabiliser on sliding mode control (SMC) is designed. Such stabilisers mainly includes two parts: the design of the wide-area controller and compensation of the communication constraints. First, a new sliding mode switching function is proposed for designing the wide-area controller. Then, the networked predictive control (NPC) algorithm based on the designed controller is used to compensate the network-induced delay and packet dropouts in CAPS. Furthermore, the stability of the close-loop error system is proved. Finally, one three-area power system is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results verify that the stabiliser designed in this paper is reasonable and effective.