In case of Indian Railways routes, only Reliance Jio met the benchmark of less than or equal to 2% call drop rate.

Unable to get good mobile phone connectivity while travelling on Indian Railways network or highways? Tired of persistent call drops and call failures while on the go? A recent report released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) suggests that all telecom companies, except Reliance Jio, have failed the call drop test on three chosen Indian Railways routes! The network drive tests were conducted by TRAI on different highways and routes of Indian Railways. Except Reliance Jio, all telecom operators failed to meet the call drop benchmark, on one or the other route. In case of Indian Railways routes, only Reliance Jio met the benchmark of less than or equal to 2% call drop rate.

The telecom operators who failed to meet the call drop benchmark on various routes included Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Idea and state-run BSNL, according to a press release issued by TRAI. However, all telecom network providers did not fail the tests in totality. On various routes the major telcos met the benchmark requirement as well, but it was only Reliance Jio that did not fail the tests on any of the routes. The Independent Drive Tests (IDTs) were conducted by TRAI through its appointed agency on as many as eight highways and three railway routes. The tests were held in order to assess the network quality provided by cellular mobile telephone service providers for voice service only.

During the Independent Drive Tests conducted by TRAI, many key performance indicators were assessed for the networks of all these telecom service providers operating in the region. The key performance indicators for voice services included coverage, call setup success rate (CSSR), drop call rate, block call rate, handover success rate and Rx quality. The eight highways, which were covered in the tests were from Asansol to Gaya, Digha to Asansol, Gaya to Danapur, Dehradun to Nainital, Bengaluru to Murdeshwar, Raipur to Jagdalpur, Mount Abu to Jaipur and Srinagar to Leh. While the three railway routes which were covered in the drive tests were the routes from Delhi to Mumbai, Allahabad to Gorakhpur and Jabalpur to Singrauli.