Here comes another long-time tradition: When we compare the performances in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Swiss operators demonstrate where the forefront can be found. While our evalua­tion scheme delivers a wide ­dispersion of results in other countries, the Swiss contenders regularly achieve the ­grade “outstanding“ – which connect issues only rarely.

Still, this fierce combat on the highest level is exciting again and again: Which Swiss network manages to collect the total win? How distinct is the lead over the best operators in Germany and Austria? And how does the smallest Swiss operator Salt fare in compa­rison to its bigger ­competitors Swisscom and Sunrise? Let‘s have a closer look.

Voice connections

After recently also Salt introduced the modern telephony mode VoLTE (Voice over LTE) in its network, conducting voice calls over data packets and with­out the „circuit-switched fallback“ to 3G or  2G connections is now standard in all three Swiss networks. And it pays off: The smallest ope­rator Salt now comes much closer to its two strong competitors when we look at the call setup times or voice quality – even if it does not absolutely reach their very high levels. Especially in smaller towns, the gap is still a little more distinct. But also there as well as on the Swiss roads, Salt managed to improve its performance over the previous year.

Also noteworthy are the high success ratios achieves by Sunrise and Swisscom in cities and towns as well as on the connecting roads. In the Sun­rise network, literally a 100 percent of the test calls conducted during the walktests in cities and towns succeeded. Swisscom accomplishes the same in the larger cities and only narrowly misses the 100 percent mark in the smaller towns. Possibly record-breaking as well are Sunrise‘s call setup times ranging clearly below one second in all ­tested sce­narios – including Swiss trains.

Data connections

What was already apparent in the voice discipline, becomes clear again in the data cate­gory: Swisscom and Sunrise have a neck-and-neck race on the highest level, Salt follows at a relatively close distance. 

Almost complete LTE coverage at all locations visited by umlaut‘s teams and a high share of data connections with 4CA („4 carrier aggregation“ – the combination of four LTE carrier frequencies on suitable devices) in the larger cities – this is what charac­terizes the measurement ­results  of Swisscom and  Sunrise. In bigger cities and smaller towns as well as on the connecting roads, the two Swiss operators with the ­largest customer numbers achieve top success rates for all ­data tests. But also the smaller contender Salt does not have to hide its results. 

The tight distance at which the battle for the top position
is fought at becomes apparent when we take a closer look at the test results in the indivi­dual ­categories: In the drivetests conducted in larger cities, Sunrise and Swisscom prac­tically share the same high rank. In the big-city walktests Sunrise takes a narrow lead, while in the drivetests in smaller towns an on the connecting roads, it is Swisscom‘s turn to ­achieve the top score. Again, also Salt shows convincing results in the data measurements conducted on the roads. All in all, Swiss drivers get on very well with all three operators.

Top mobile connectivity in Swiss trains

With only minor limitations, this ­also applies to Swiss railways. Here the helvetic operators show their neighbours (Austria to some extent, but first of all Germany), how the provision of mobile communications in trains should really look like. In the telephony ­category, the best contender Swisscom convinces with ­gathering 96 percent of the available points. The weakest candidate, Salt, still achieves 89 percent. When it comes to data connections, the overall level is even higher. When we look at success ratios between 90 percent and 99 percent for accessing websites or receiving video streams, it would seem almost silly to mention a “potential for improvement“ in the light of the results from Austria and Germany. 

Still, we do not want to miss the oportunity to mention that on the overall utterly high ­level, in a direct comparison between the competitors, Swisscom is slightly ahead. Sunrise scores in the middle field, and Salt last. But even this third-ranking operator achieves results which would easilty suffice for a category win in other countries. Sorry, but we simply could not help mentioning this fact once again ...