Airtel, RPG and Hutch in Chennai and Gujarat have the most satisfied mobile customers according to a survey conducted by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

Over 93 per cent of the cellular subscribers of these operators have said that they were satisfied with the overall service being offered. Reliance GSM based subscribers in West Bengal are the least satisfied with only 44 per cent saying that the service was up to the mark.

The study conducted by IMRB to asses quality of service provided by basic, GSM and CDMA based service providers for the period October-December 2003 has said that cellular operators were providing much better quality of service that the basic services operators.

"Fierce competition in the cellular market has forced operators to constantly keep improving their networks resulting in acceptable levels of service." Trai said.

However there was scope for improvement in the billing complaint incidence and call success rate. Mobile services in Circle C states of Assam, North East, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir were "poor" compared to other parts of the country.

"It has been observed that quality of cellular service needs significant improvement in the Eastern region," Trai said in the report.

In the basic services segment, subscribers of Tata Teleservices in Maharashtra are the happiest lot. 92 per cent of Tatas customers have said that they were satisfied with the overall service.

Bharti and BSNL follow with 91 per cent of its subscribers satisfied in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.  The least satisfied are BSNL's customers in Assam with only 60 per cent saying that they were happy.

Trai has, however, pointed out that the basic services are not up to the desired standards. "There is an urgent need for improvement of quality of services among basic services. The situation is quite bad in terms of provision of new connections. Number of faults per 100 subscribers per month, time taken to repair faults and time taken to shift connections."

On the CDMA based mobile services Trai has said that though the overall performance is good, key concern areas are billing related issues and high rate of fault.