The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released the findings of its drive test conducted in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, highlighting notable variations in mobile network performance across Airtel, BSNL, Reliance Jio (RJIL), and Vodafone Idea. The assessment was carried out in November 2025 and evaluated services across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks.
The drive test covered 180 kilometres of urban drive routes, six hotspot locations, 2.3 kilometres of walk tests, and one inter-operator calling location. Testing spanned residential areas, institutional zones, transport hubs, and high-speed corridors. TRAI measured key quality-of-service parameters for both voice and data, including call setup success rate, call drop rate, call setup time, speech quality, throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, and video streaming delay. The results have been formally shared with all telecom service providers.
In auto-selection mode across all technologies, call setup success rates remained high, led by RJIL at 99.73 percent, followed by BSNL at 98.64 percent, Airtel at 98.11 percent, and Vodafone Idea at 96.82 percent. However, drop call rates varied sharply, with Vodafone Idea recording the lowest rate at 0.27 percent, followed by RJIL at 0.55 percent. Airtel registered a drop call rate of 2.20 percent, while BSNL recorded a significantly higher rate of 6.34 percent.
Call setup times also showed divergence. RJIL delivered the fastest average call setup time at 0.79 seconds, followed by Vodafone Idea at 1.06 seconds and Airtel at 1.44 seconds. BSNL recorded the slowest average call setup time at 3.36 seconds. On packet-switched 4G and 5G networks, call silence or mute rates stood at 2.17 percent for Airtel, 2.92 percent for RJIL, and 1.44 percent for Vodafone Idea. Speech quality, measured through Mean Opinion Score, placed Airtel at the top with an average MOS of 3.93, followed by Vodafone Idea at 3.88 and RJIL at 3.70, while BSNL trailed at 2.37.
Data performance results revealed an even wider gap among operators. In overall download speeds, RJIL led with an average of 252.75 Mbps across 5G and 4G networks, followed by Airtel at 168.90 Mbps. Vodafone Idea and BSNL delivered substantially lower average download speeds of 12.64 Mbps and 8.26 Mbps respectively. For uploads, Airtel recorded the highest average speed at 34.93 Mbps, while RJIL achieved 30.78 Mbps. Vodafone Idea and BSNL lagged behind with average upload speeds below 6 Mbps.
Latency measurements showed Airtel delivering the lowest median latency at 22.56 milliseconds, followed by RJIL at 26.38 milliseconds and BSNL at 26.87 milliseconds. Vodafone Idea recorded the highest latency at 34.40 milliseconds. Hotspot testing further underlined performance differences. On 5G, RJIL achieved peak download speeds of 377.30 Mbps, while Airtel recorded 183.68 Mbps. On 4G, RJIL again led with 69.20 Mbps, followed by Airtel at 40.65 Mbps, BSNL at 15.64 Mbps, and Vodafone Idea at 11.67 Mbps.
The assessment covered densely populated areas such as Panjhera, Nalagarh, Baddi, Barotiwala, and Haripurm, as well as public locations including Baddi Bus Stand, City Hospital Baddi, Baddi University, Maurice Square Mall, and major educational and religious sites. Walk tests conducted at City Square Mall and Gol Market Baddi provided additional insights into network performance in crowded pedestrian environments, reflecting real-world user experience.
