All telcos fail in Trai's call drop test in Sikkim, Darjeeling

Exposing poor state of mobile services in Sikkim and Darjeeling, all telecom operators failed in the Trai's call drop test and also most of the calls could not be connected on their networks.

"All operators failed to meet the call drop rate benchmark ... Most of the operators failed to meet the call blocked rate benchmark, except MTS CDMA," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said today.

The call drop and the blocked call rate, or phenomenon of inability to connect call when a subscriber dials, were found across all areas of Sikkim and Darjeeling, the Trai report on drive tests conducted between May 25-27, 2016, said.

Trai has fixed a penalty of up to Rs 2 lakh for poor mobile services, including call drops. This penalty kicks in for more than 2 per cent call drops in a quarter in one telecom circle.

The regulator found Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and BSNL using high value of radio-link timeout (RLT) technology compared to the level generally used by them in most of the cities.

High value of RLT is alleged to be used by telecom operators for reducing call drop incidents in their records.

The regulator also published result of drive tests conducted in Ranchi from June 1 to 3, 2016 in which all operators, except Telenor, failed to meet call drop benchmark.

"A big gap between the good performance operators (Telenor 2G, Idea 2G and Vodafone (2G)) compared to the poor performances of other operators clearly shows in the areas driven, it is possible for other operators to offer much better Quality of Service than in currently being provided," the report said.

Idea marginally failed to meet call drop benchmark and call drop on Vodafone network was little above 3 per cent compared to the benchmark of 2%.