In this paper, the outage probability of maximum ratio combining (MRC) in the spherically invariant fading environment was analyzed. The study was done with and without consideration of the effect of noise. First, the probability density functions (pdf) of signal‐to‐interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and signal‐to‐interference ratio (SIR) were derived. In our derivation, the characteristic pdfs of spherically invariant random process (SIRP) corresponding to the interferences were assumed to be both different and identical. Moreover, both equal and different mean powers of interferences were considered. With the derived pdfs of SINR and SIR, the expressions of outage probability were computed. Numerical analysis was done using three numerical methods known as Gauss–Laguerre, Gauss–Hermite, and Gauss–Legendre integrations. It should be noted that SIRP, the generalization of Gaussian random process, is assumed to have K‐distribution, which is the generalization of Rayleigh. Our analysis was verified by comparing the outage probabilities of the considered environments with those of Rayleigh fading channel. From the numerical results, the derived outage probability converges to that of Rayleigh fading, when the shape parameter of characteristic pdf approaches infinity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.