The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released its independent drive test (IDT) findings for Tamil Nadu licensed service area (LSA), covering extensive city of Puducherry surrounding areas in the month of February 2026. The drive tests conducted under the supervision of the TRAI Regional Office, Hyderabad, were designed to capture real-world mobile network performance across diverse usage environments- Urban Zones, Institutional Hotspots, rural residential areas etc.
Between February 5, 2026 and February 7, 2026, TRAI teams conducted detailed tests for 313.2 kilometres (Kms) Puducherry city drive test and eight hotspot locations. Technologies evaluated included 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G, reflecting the service experience of users across multiple handset capabilities. The findings of the IDT have been intimated to all the telecom service providers concerned.
Key parameters assessed include call setup success rate, drop call rate, call setup time, call silence rate, speech quality, coverage, download/upload throughput, latency, jitter, packet drop rate, and video streaming delay.
As per the test, Bharti Airtel, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), Reliance Jio (Jio) and Vodafone Idea Limited (Vi) had call setup success rate of 100 per cent, 90.91 per cent, 98.84 per cent and 99.61 per cent and a call setup time of 1.15, 4.50, 0.71 and 1.86 seconds respectively in auto-selection mode (5G/4G/3G/2G). Meanwhile, their drop call rate stood at 0 per cent, 1.46 per cent, 0.39 per cent and 0 per cent respectively in auto-selection mode (5G/4G/3G/2G). Further, the telcos had a silence call rate of 0.24 per cent, 4.16 per cent, 0.96 per cent and 0.23 per cent in packet switched network (5G/4G) and an average mean opinion score of 4, 3.01, 4.45 and 4.42 respectively.
Furthermore, the average download speed of Airtel (5G/4G/2G) was 163.82 Mbps, BSNL (4G/3G/2G) was 12.71 Mbps, Jio (5G/4G) was 253.84 Mbps and Vi (4G/2G) is 22.05 Mbps while their average upload speed was 27.94 Mbps, 5.11 Mbps, 16.92 Mbps and 13.03 Mbps respectively. In addition, their 50th percentile latency stood at 41.50 ms, 42.47 ms, 25.94 ms and 32.81 ms respectively.
