The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has released the findings of its Drive Test for Baddi city in Himachal Pradesh, assessing mobile network performance during November 2025.
The assessment covered urban routes, institutional hotspots, public transport hubs and high-speed corridors, with tests conducted across 180 km of city drive routes, six hotspot locations, 2.3 km of walk tests and one inter-operator calling location. The evaluation included 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G services, and the results have been shared with all concerned telecom service providers, TRAI said in its report.
TRAI assessed key quality of service parameters for voice and data, including call setup success rate, drop call rate, call setup time, call silence, speech quality, throughput, latency, jitter, packet drop rate and video streaming delay.
In auto-selection mode across all technologies, call setup success rates stood at 98.11 percent for Airtel, 98.64 percent for BSNL, 99.73 percent for RJTL and 96.82 percent for Vodafone Idea. Drop call rates were recorded at 2.20 percent for Airtel, 6.34 percent for BSNL, 0.55 percent for RJTL and 0.27 percent for Vodafone Idea, reflecting variations in network performance across operators in the city.
Voice services
The assessment of voice services shows varied performance among operators in auto-selection mode across 5G, 4G, 3G and 2G networks. Call setup success rates remained high, with RJIL leading at 99.73 percent, followed by BSNL at 98.64 percent, Airtel at 98.11 percent and Vodafone Idea at 96.82 percent.
Call setup times ranged from under a second to over three seconds, with RJIL recording the fastest average call setup time of 0.79 seconds, followed by Vodafone Idea at 1.06 seconds and Airtel at 1.44 seconds, while BSNL recorded the highest call setup time at 3.36 seconds.
Drop call rates varied significantly across operators, with Vodafone Idea reporting the lowest drop call rate at 0.27 percent, closely followed by RJIL at 0.55 percent. Airtel recorded a drop call rate of 2.20 percent, while BSNL showed a comparatively higher rate of 6.34 percent.
On packet-switched networks covering 4G and 5G, call silence or mute rates were recorded at 2.17 percent for Airtel, 2.92 percent for RJIL and 1.44 percent for Vodafone Idea. In terms of speech quality, measured by Mean Opinion Score, Airtel achieved an average MOS of 3.93, followed by Vodafone Idea at 3.88 and RJIL at 3.70, while BSNL recorded a lower average MOS of 2.37.
Data services
The assessment of data services in Baddi highlights a wide performance gap among operators across overall network usage and hotspot locations. In overall download performance, RJIL recorded the highest average speed at 252.75 Mbps on 5G and 4G networks, followed by Airtel at 168.90 Mbps across 5G, 4G and 2G. Vodafone Idea and BSNL delivered significantly lower average download speeds of 12.64 Mbps and 8.26 Mbps respectively on 4G and 2G networks.
For upload performance, Airtel led with an average speed of 34.93 Mbps, while RJIL recorded 30.78 Mbps. Vodafone Idea and BSNL lagged behind with average upload speeds of 5.91 Mbps and 5.37 Mbps respectively. In terms of latency, Airtel recorded the lowest 50th percentile latency at 22.56 milliseconds, followed by RJIL at 26.38 milliseconds and BSNL at 26.87 milliseconds, while Vodafone Idea showed the highest latency at 34.40 milliseconds.
Hotspot testing further reinforced the performance differences. On 5G, RJIL achieved peak download speeds of 377.30 Mbps and upload speeds of 37.08 Mbps, while Airtel recorded 183.68 Mbps download and 42.66 Mbps upload. On 4G, RJIL delivered 69.20 Mbps download, Airtel 40.65 Mbps and BSNL 15.64 Mbps, with Vodafone Idea trailing at 11.67 Mbps.
The assessment covered high-density neighbourhoods including Panjhera, Nalagarh, Baddi, Barotiwala and Haripurm, along with key public locations such as Baddi Bus Stand, City Hospital Baddi, Baddi University, Maurice Square Mall and major educational and religious sites. A walk test conducted on 13 November 2025 at City Square Mall and Gol Market Baddi captured network performance in crowded pedestrian environments, providing insights into real-world user experience.
BABURAJAN KIZHAKEDATH