Swiss Mobile Plan and Prepaid Mobile Comparison 2024

You can easily find the best mobile plan or prepaid mobile service for your specific needs using the unbiased mobile plan comparison on moneyland.ch. Take a moment to think about what you want to do with your phone. Then, select the mobile user profile which best matches your phone use, or enter your specific criteria into a custom profile.

You can find useful tips for choosing the right mobile service here.

Plans and prepaid offers which have flat fees which cover a certain amount of calls or data are very popular in Switzerland. Many of these provide unlimited local calls and/or unlimited local data. There are regular special promotional offers for mobile plans with unlimited local calls and data, and these can have flat fees as low as 20 francs per month.

Some flat-fee plans only include limited call or data allowances. These plans can be an affordable alternative if you do not make a lot of calls or use a lot of mobile data.

Previously it was common for mobile service providers to bill you based on call minutes or megabytes used. Today only a handful of plans and prepaid mobile services still use per-unit billing, with the majority using flat-fee models instead.

The moneyland.ch comparison accounts for all flat-fee and per-unit-billing models.

There are various factors which determine the total costs of mobile plans and prepaid offers. The unbiased mobile plan comparison on moneyland.ch accounts for these cost factors:

• Basic monthly fees.
• Flat fees for unlimited telecom allowances.
• Costs and telecom allowances of optional bundles and options.
• Costs applicable to using mobile data in Switzerland (local data) and when outside of Switzerland (data roaming).
• Per-minute fees for phone calls within Switzerland, international calls from Switzerland, and roaming calls outside of Switzerland. Per-call fees and maximum per-call fees are also accounted for.
• Call minute bundles for calls within Switzerland, roaming calls, and international calls from Switzerland to other countries.
• Hidden fees resulting from billing intervals.
• Fees for local SMS messages within Switzerland and SMS messages to Switzerland from other countries (roaming).
• Cross-category services from mobile plans, prepaid offers, options and bundles.
• One-time costs like activation fees and SIM fees.
• One-time complementary starting credits and one-time discounts.
• Discounts and special promotions.

Many mobile plans and prepaid mobile services include complimentary telecom allowances. You can see what allowances are included in the detailed product breakdowns.

Allowances may include local call, SMS and data allowances. They may also include international call, call roaming and data roaming allowances for the countries which you specify.

Based on the information you enter, the moneyland.ch algorithm calculates the optimal plan and prepaid offer. The comparison also accounts for optional bundles and options and adds these to plans or prepaid offers when adding them works out cheaper than not adding them.

Options and bundles used in calculations are shown in product breakdowns.

Important: When you use certain roaming options and roaming bundles, it is very important that you deactivate them after your trip. Many service providers continue to renew options and bundles every month and charge you for them.

When you get a mobile plan, you typically use a mobile service on credit and receive a phone bill at the end of a billing period. In Switzerland, mobile plans are more widely used than prepaid mobile services.

The main advantage of prepaid mobile is that you have full control over spending because your use of telecom services is limited by the prepaid credits available.

Only three mobile service providers in Switzerland – Swisscom, Sunrise and Salt – operate their own mobile networks. But there are numerous additional mobile service providers which offer their own mobile plans and prepaid mobile services but make use of the physical networks from the three network operators.

Many mobile service providers are subsidiaries of either Swisscom, Sunrise, or Salt. Some are joint ventures between major retailers and mobile service providers.

Some mobile service providers operate largely independently of the three network operators, but use mobile networks for the last portion of service delivery (the connection between their fixed networks and customer mobile phones). These service providers include Quickline and TalkTalk.

The moneyland.ch comparison clearly shows which telecom network is used for a mobile plan or prepaid mobile service. You can also filter all offers based on the networks used.

Swiss mobile service providers offer many different telecom services. Primary services include phone calls within Switzerland, phone calls while traveling outside of Switzerland (call roaming), international phone calls from Switzerland to other countries, and mobile Internet access within Switzerland (local data) and outside of Switzerland (data roaming).

You can use the filters under the services tab in the mobile plan comparison to find plans and prepaid offers based on these additional services:

• Mobile ID: The mobile ID service provides a means of authenticating your identity for online purposes. This service requires a special SIM card which supports mobile ID. Authentication via mobile ID is offered by some Swiss banks (for online banking), government services and online merchants.
• Visual voice mail: Visual voice mail services let you access messages in your telephone answering service without having to manually dial up the service. The service is provided digitally through your smartphone’s graphic interface. Visual voice mail is particularly popular among iPhone users, but is also available for Android-powered phones.
• Phone answering services: These let callers leave voice messages when you are not available. You can then listen to these messages at a later time.
• Wi-Fi calling: A Wi-Fi calling service lets your phone connect to mobile networks via WLAN networks. This is useful when you are in locations which have poor mobile signal reception but are equipped with WLAN networks.
• Supplementary SIM cards: Some mobile plans give you the option of obtaining multiple supplementary SIM cards linked to the same plan. This is beneficial if you want to use just one mobile plan for multiple devices.
• eSIM: Some service providers offer eSIM connections in addition to conventional SIM cards.

Mobile plans come with numerous possible cost pitfalls. These include:

• Pay-per-call numbers: Calls to pay-per-call phone numbers are always billed in addition to standard rates, even if you have an all-inclusive flat fee. In Switzerland, pay-per-call numbers typically begin with 0840, 0842, 0844, 0900 or 0906. Calls to pay-per-call numbers such as the customers service numbers of many companies can quickly become expensive.
• Excess usage: Some mobile service providers charge you extremely high per-minute or per-megabyte fees for calls or data in excess of the allowances covered by the flat fee. You can avoid these by either deactivating mobile data on your phone once your data allowance is used up or adding a data bundle. Some mobile services let you continue to use data at no extra charge after your allowance is used, but throttle the Internet speed to where it can only be used for the least data-intensive tasks.
• International calls: Many Swiss telecom service providers regularly raise their International call prices. Some plans have very affordable flat-fee offers for international calls. Others have extremely unfavorable international calling charges. Even calls to other European countries can cost more than one franc per minute with some mobile plans or prepaid mobile offers.

Many Swiss mobile plans include some call or data roaming allowances. But these allowances are often very small.

It is better not to use your phone service outside of Switzerland without first getting informed about the costs and possible savings options. If your mobile plan’s roaming allowances are insufficient, buying an optional roaming option or roaming bundle is recommended.

If you do not, you can end up being charged very high roaming fees. Some Swiss mobile service providers charge as much as several hundred francs for just a small amount of call or data roaming in certain countries.

The moneyland.ch mobile plan and prepaid mobile comparison accounts for roaming options and roaming bundles in addition to roaming allowances included in plans.

You can find useful tips for using mobile data while traveling (data roaming) and for making calls while traveling (call roaming) in our practical telecom guides.

Calling people in other countries can be very expensive. Even calls to other European countries can cost 1 franc per minute or more with many mobile service providers. Even though the actual cost of delivering international telecom services has steadily gone down, many service providers regularly increase their international phone call rates.

The billing schedules used for international phone calls have long been a cost trap. Service providers known that customers who do not get informed about pricing in advance generally call at per-minute rates by default.

But many service providers offer optional international call bundles and options. Some flat-fee mobile plans cover international calls to some countries. Some include a certain number of international call minutes. The countries included in these allowances differ between mobile service providers. Most commonly, international call allowances only cover calls to European countries.

You can find useful tips for international phone calls here.

Depending on how you use your phone, adding options or bundles to your plan or prepaid mobile service can be beneficial. This is especially true if you use mobile roaming when traveling outside of Switzerland. The moneyland.ch comparison automatically shows you when adding an option or bundle works out cheaper for your telecom needs. It also shows you which options and bundles you should add.

Various filters and sort options on the results page help you quickly find the offer that best matches your needs.

You can also find detailed breakdowns of the features of each mobile plan or prepaid mobile offer. Properties include:

• Network technology: Several different kinds of mobile networks are used in Switzerland. Networks built on the 3G (UMTS) and 4G (LTE) standards are well established. Networks based on the 5G standard are still being developed.
• Data transfer speed: There are major differences in the Internet speeds delivered by different mobile plans and prepaid mobile services. The download and upload speeds are clearly shown in the product information breakdowns. Note that even though service providers may advertise very high Internet connection speeds, in practice your connection will rarely or never achieve those maximum speeds.

moneyland.ch regularly conducts representative surveys of customer satisfaction with Swiss telecom service providers, mobile plans and prepaid mobile services.

Survey participants rate these criteria individually:

• General satisfaction
• Satisfaction with customer service
• Satisfaction with mobile Internet
• Satisfaction with billing
• Satisfaction with network quality

There are major differences in customer satisfaction with different mobile service providers. Customer satisfaction ratings are shown on individual product information pages.

You can also sort mobile plans and prepaid mobile offers in the comparison by customer satisfaction ratings.

Special promotional offers have become a steady fixture in the Swiss telecom market. In many cases, the cheapest available mobile plans or prepaid mobile services are special promotional offers. moneyland.ch adds and updates special promotional offers to the mobile plan comparison on an ongoing basis to ensure you always find the best offer available.

You can find useful tips for taking advantage of mobile service promotions here.

The mobile plan comparison lets you compare plans with included devices.

In many cases, it is cheaper to get a stand-along mobile plan or prepaid offer (SIM only) and then buy the phone you want separately (at a cheap online dealer, for example).

The mobile plan and device cost calculator makes it easy to calculate whether getting a phone with a plan is a better deal.

Although only Swisscom, Sunrise and Salt operate their own mobile networks, there are many other Swiss mobile service providers which offer mobile plans and prepaid mobile services. All of these make use of the three mobile networks.

The unbiased mobile plan comparison on moneyland.ch accounts for all relevant Swiss mobile service providers. These include:
ALDI SUISSE mobile, Coop Mobile, Digital Republic, Galaxus Mobile, GoMo, iWay, Lebara, Lidl, M-Budget, Mucho, Post Mobile, Quickline, Salt, Sunrise, Swisscom, Swype,TalkTalk, Wingo, Yallo.

Established Swiss telecom expert Ralf Beyeler from moneyland.ch is happy to answer your telecom questions free of charge. Just send us your question by email or post it in our telecom forum.