Edition 2023
ComCom's activity report provides an overview of the various aspects of the mobile and fixed telephony markets, and presents the commission's activities in 2023.
(Extracts)
The saturated mobile telecoms market has remained more or less stable in recent years. With a mobile phone penetration rate of 123% at the end of 2023, the growth in the number of customers has slowed down (+1.5%). Although the merger with UPC strengthened Sunrise’s market position, this hardly changed its market share in mobile telephony.
Switzerland enjoys almost complete mobile coverage with state-of-the-art 4G and 5G technologies. After Swisscom and Salt gradually switched off their 2G networks (GSM, GPRS and Edge) between 2019 and 2021, Sunrise also halted support from the start of January 2023. Third generation (3G) networks are also being gradually abandoned by the operators.
Switzerland has also a very high-performance broadband infrastructure. The economy and the population benefit from competition between different infrastructure providers and services thanks to a wide range of products.
Switzerland has a high number of broadband contracts for connections over the fixed network. By mid-2023, 49.1% of the Swiss population had a broadband internet connection, thereby consolidating the country's top-ranking position in an OECD-wide comparison.
In contrast, Switzerland, cannot claim to be the world leader in respect of direct fibre to the home connections (FTTH/B). The number of domestic fibre-optic contracts (FTTH/B) in Switzerland is gradually increasing. Growth of the fibre-optic segment is primarily the result of DSL and CATV subscribers migrating to fibre optic technology. At the end of 2023, the estimated number of fibre-optic connections amounted to around 27% of total broadband connections in Switzerland, or around 1.2 million.