Switzerland coverage

What the Switzerland numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 112 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 39 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in Switzerland when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over Swisscom and Salt. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Mobile operators in Switzerland

• Swisscom: Swisscom had 6,438,000 mobile customers in Switzerland at the end of 2025, up 107,000 in a year after gaining 185,000 contract customers and losing 78,000 prepaid ones. It held about 53.1 percent of all mobile customers at the end of 2024.
• Swisscom: In the 2019 auction Swisscom won the largest holdings in both main 5G bands, 30 MHz of 700 MHz FDD spectrum and 120 MHz of the 3.5 GHz band, and paid CHF 195,554,002.
• Sunrise: Sunrise ended 2025 with 3,159,000 mobile customers, up 0.9 percent, and held 23.6 percent of the market at the end of 2024. About 90 percent of its customers are on contracts, the highest share of the three networks.
• Sunrise: Sunrise took 100 MHz of the 3.5 GHz band and 10 MHz of 700 MHz FDD spectrum in the 2019 auction for CHF 89,238,101, the smallest bill of the three operators.
• Sunrise: In the 2012 auction, which reassigned all existing and upcoming mobile spectrum, Sunrise paid CHF 481,720,000, more than Swisscom's CHF 359,846,000 and Orange's CHF 154,702,000, out of CHF 996,268,000 in total.
• Salt: Salt grew fastest of the three networks in 2025, by 6.3 percent to 2,254,000 mobile customers, adding about 110,000 contracts and 24,000 prepaid customers. It held 17.7 percent of the market at the end of 2024.
• Salt: Salt paid CHF 94,500,625 in the 2019 auction for 20 MHz of 700 MHz FDD spectrum and 80 MHz of the 3.5 GHz band.

Older networks in Switzerland

• Swiss operators switched off their 2G networks between 2019 and 2023. Sunrise shut its 3G network in mid 2025 and Swisscom at the end of 2025, while Salt had set no date but was expected to keep 3G running until the end of 2026.
• Swisscom began phasing out 3G at the end of 2025 and set the final shutdown for 7 April 2026. It warns that 4G phones which still use 3G for calls stop working, and that a phone whose 4G symbol disappears during a call is not using VoLTE.
• Phones without 4G can no longer be used in Switzerland. Phones that use 4G for data but need 2G or 3G for calls, because they lack VoLTE, lose voice calling, and on some handsets VoLTE has to be switched on by hand in the settings.

5G in Switzerland

• Swisscom switched on the first 5G network in Switzerland at midnight on 17 April 2019, at 102 sites in 54 towns including Basel, Bern, Chur, Davos, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich.
• The 5G spectrum auction ran from 29 January to 7 February 2019 and sold 700 MHz, 1400 MHz and 3.5 GHz frequencies for CHF 379,292,728, on licences lasting 15 years. A fourth bidder, Dense Air, took part but won no spectrum.
• The 2019 licences required any holder of 700 MHz FDD spectrum to cover at least 50 percent of the Swiss population with its own infrastructure by 31 December 2024, and other holders 25 percent. A licensee that missed the target could have its rights withdrawn without compensation.
• By the end of 2025 Swisscom reached 99 percent of the population with 5G and 88 percent with its faster 5G+ layer. Sunrise covered over 99 percent with 5G, basic and standalone, and 79 percent with its 5G broadband layer.
• 5G reached 95 percent of Switzerland's land area at the end of 2024, up from 74 percent in 2021. 4G covered 98 percent of the land area and, in the regulator's rounded figures, 100 percent of the population.
• Sunrise 5G standalone needs a subscription enabled for it and a certified device, and on Apple devices also a SIM or eSIM with SUCI support. Access depends on manufacturers certifying handsets and releasing firmware updates.

Network notes for Switzerland

• The licences won in 2012 for the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2600 MHz bands, a good half of all mobile spectrum in use, expire at the end of 2028. The tender opened on 1 September 2026, with the auction expected in the second quarter of 2027.
• Switzerland counted 11,919,398 mobile subscriptions at the end of 2024, or 131.7 per 100 residents. Only 15.5 percent were prepaid, down from 21 percent in 2021.
• Among prepaid customers the order changes: at the end of 2024 Swisscom held 47.3 percent, Salt 20.4 percent and Sunrise 17.7 percent, while smaller providers together held 14.6 percent, up from 6.5 percent in 2019.
• Mobile data traffic in Switzerland reached 2.36 billion gigabytes in 2024, 12.7 percent more than in 2023.