Cellphones ring clear in Uttar Pradesh (East)

Increasing network congestion notwithstanding, the call drop rate of cellular service providers in Uttar Pradesh (East) circle is below the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) benchmark.

Against the benchmark of 2 per cent, the call drop rate of all the existing telecom service providers is below the red mark with Uninor topping the list at 1.89 per cent.

The call drop is measured as the percentage of established calls getting disconnected due to network problems. UP (East) circle is among the largest telecom circles in the country with over 57 million subscribers.

According to the Trai data for quarter ended September 2010, Vodafone stood second in call drop rate with 1.69 per cent, followed by state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) (1.53 per cent) and Idea Cellular (1.30 per cent).

 

Meanwhile, Idea topped the list in accessibility at 99.67 per cent, measured as the percentage of calls made by subscribers and successful within the operator’s network.

The Trai benchmark is more than 95 per cent. It was followed by Tata Telecom CDMA (99.64). All the service providers had 100 per cent resolution of billing as the percentage of billing/charging complaints resolved within four weeks (the benchmark).

Telecom operators in UP (E) include Vodafone, Airtel, Tata (CDMA and GSM), Reliance (CDMA and GSM), Idea, BSNL, Uninor and new entrant MTS.

In wire telephony, Airtel had the maximum fault incidence at 4.41, which is measured as the number of faults per 100 subscribers. It also had the highest mean time to repair at 9.21 against the Trai benchmark of eight hours.

Reliance reported lowest fault incidence at 2.19 compared to Airtel, Tata (4.21) and BSNL (3.70). Tata had the lowest mean time to repair at 1.36, followed by Reliance (2.08) and BSNL (6.59).