Big Price Differences Between Swiss Home Internet Plans

Having a good home Internet connection has become very important for many consumers. A good Internet plan is particularly valuable for professionals who work from home. It is worth comparing the prices charged by various Internet service providers (ISPs), as the differences are large.

Telecom expert Ralf Beyeler from moneyland.ch compared the prices of home Internet plans for three different bandwidth categories.

Slow Internet plans for under 30 francs per month

For the study, moneyland.ch compared the home Internet plans with a speed of at least 10 Mbps (for both downstream and upstream). That speed is sufficient for browsing popular websites, shopping online, online banking, and even streaming videos in standard definition.

Table 1: The cheapest home Internet offer per ISP (minimum 10 Mbps)

* This offer includes additional services like TV and/or phone calls.

Just four of the twelve Swiss Internet service providers included in the comparison offer home Internet plans with speeds lower than 100 Mbps. These are Swisscom, Teleboy, iWay, and M-Budget. Only two of the twelve offer slow Internet plans for less than 30 francs per month.

Swisscom offers slow home Internet plans. These are not included in the comparison because they have an upstream speed of less than 10 Mbps.

The eight Internet service providers that do not have plans with speeds below 100 Mbps only offer more expensive high-speed plans.

Fast Internet plans for less than 40 francs per month

The second comparison includes Internet plans with a speed of at least 100 Mbps. This speed enables fast and convenient web browsing, even when the connection is shared between multiple devices.

Table 2: The cheapest home Internet offer per ISP (minimum 100 Mbps)

* This offer includes additional services like TV and/or phone calls.

The above comparison of Swiss home Internet plans with a speed of at least 100 Mbps reveals that Teleboy and iWay are the cheapest ISPs in this category, with total costs of just over 500 francs for the first year. Other ISPs are notably more expensive. Plans from Sunrise and Salt cost nearly 700 francs for the first year – nearly 200 francs or 39 percent more than the cheapest available plan. Swisscom is 55 percent more expensive than the cheapest ISP, and Yallo charges 63 percent more.

High-speed Internet from 47.90 francs per month

For the third comparison, moneyland.ch looked at home Internet plans with a speed of at least 1 Gbps. A high-speed plan with 1 Gbps or more enables consumers to use virtually any Internet function, even when many devices are sharing the same connection. “In practice, a 1 Gbps connection is still so fast that there are very few home Internet users that actually need one,” says moneyland.ch telecom expert Ralf Beyeler.

Internet plans with speeds of 1 Gbps or more require an optical fiber connection.

Table 3: The cheapest home Internet offer per ISP (minimum 1 Gbps)

* This offer includes additional services like TV and/or phone calls.

Teleboy and iWay are the cheapest offers, with a total cost of around 620 francs for the first year. Some of their competitors are much more expensive, with some ISPs charging more than 1000 francs for their Internet plans in the first year.

For a private home, the difference between a 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) connection and a 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps) connection is generally irrelevant. Firstly, devices used in private households normally do not support speeds of more than 1 Gbps. Secondly, none of the Internet-based services for private individuals require speeds above 1 Gbps. Thirdly, if a P2MP connection is used, your 10 Gbps of bandwidth will be shared between you and another 31 homes.

Teleboy and iWay are the cheapest

In all three comparisons, the cheapest plans are offered by Teleboy and iWay. Sunrise is the cheapest out of the big three telecom companies, but is followed very closely by Salt (just 90 centimes more expensive in the first year).

With their budget service providers Wingo and Yallo, Swisscom and Sunrise respectively target price-conscious customers. But the home Internet plans from these budget providers is anything but cheap. Sunrise is cheaper than Yallo in all three bandwidth categories, with Yallo being the most or second-most expensive in all of the comparisons. The high-speed Internet plan from Wingo is more expensive than the offer sold under the Swisscom brand. “The results show that not everything that is marketed as inexpensive is actually cheap. That makes comparing prices before signing up even more important,” says Ralf Beyeler.

Expert tips for choosing the right plan

Which plan makes sense for you depends on your personal priorities, explains telecom expert Ralf Beyeler. Most consumers have to choose between these two options:

• If you want to pay as little as possible, you should choose a cheap but slow Internet plan for less than 30 francs per month.
• If you are willing to pay more, than getting a high-speed plan with 1 Gbps or more for around 50 francs is the optimal solution.

The interactive home Internet plan comparison on moneyland.ch makes it easy to compare all offers available for your specific address.

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