TRAI Drive Test Rates Mobile Networks in Nuh and Palwal

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has published what its testers found on the roads of Nuh and Palwal and the areas around them, which fall in the Haryana Licensed Service Area. The exercise is called an Independent Drive Test (IDT) and this one was carried out in July 2026; the findings were released on 5 November 2026 for the information of ordinary telecom users.

How the test was done

TRAI employs an appointed agency for the work. For these two districts the agency drove 295.2 km inside the cities, walked another 1.8 km on foot and tested at 6 hotspot locations, between 13 and 15 July 2026. The whole exercise was supervised by TRAI's Regional Office at Jaipur. Live calls and live data sessions were run on SIM cards of every operator over 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, using several advanced handsets watched in real time by software. The results describe how the networks behaved on those routes on those days, and nothing beyond that.

What is measured

• Coverage gap: the share of samples where signal strength fell below the prescribed minimum for the technology in use.
• Voice: Call Setup Success Rate, Drop Call Rate, call setup time, call silence rate and speech quality, measured as MOS.
• Call silence instances: how often a call went silent for longer than three seconds.
• Data: download and upload throughput, latency, jitter and packet drop rate.

Download and upload speeds found

On uploads in Nuh, Airtel led with 14.26 Mbps, ahead of VIL at 10.84 Mbps, RJIL at 9.71 Mbps and BSNL at 6.21 Mbps. In Palwal the order was Airtel 20.96 Mbps, RJIL 14.52 Mbps, VIL 13.03 Mbps and BSNL 7.20 Mbps.

Calls and coverage

Dropped calls were rare for most operators. In Nuh, Airtel and VIL recorded none, RJIL one and BSNL five. In Palwal, VIL recorded none, Airtel and RJIL one each and BSNL three. Call silence instances were commonest on BSNL in Nuh, and coverage gaps were also widest on BSNL in both districts. Downlink packet loss in Nuh ranged from 1.84 per cent on Airtel to 5.35 per cent on BSNL, and in Palwal from 0.79 per cent on Airtel to 2.57 per cent on BSNL.

What happens next

The routes took in Tauru, Nuh, Nagina, Sakras and Ferozpur Jhirka in Nuh district, and Palwal Rural, Hodal, Punhana and Baghola in Palwal district, among other places. The findings have been passed to the service providers so they may act where needed, and the full report sits on the TRAI website.