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Advanced maturity and intensive competition

The Swiss telecoms market is one of the most highly developed markets in the world, offering ongoing innovation and a wide range of voice and data communications services. Residential and business customers are well informed, cost-conscious, and highly discerning when it comes to quality, security and convenience.

The residential customer market is characterised by continually falling prices. Customers expect increasingly more for their money, forcing providers to cut costs and increase efficiency. The business customer market is also seeing an erosion of prices. Faced with pressure on costs, companies are passing this pressure on to providers. As telecommunications and information technology increasingly converge, integrated solutions are becoming key in this market segment. But only providers like Swisscom, with the requisite multidisciplinary competences at their disposal, are capable of delivering such solutions.

The market for fixed network telephony is largely saturated. Swisscom has around 3.8 million connections. Internet telephony, offered by various specialised companies such as Skype and others, is posing new challenges to the classical voice communications market.

The Swiss mobile communications market has also reached virtual saturation point. In an intensively competitive market with parity of offerings from different providers, the jostle for market share is focused primarily on pricing arguments. The total market covers some 6.5 million subscribers, of which 4.3 million are Swisscom customers.

In terms of Internet connectivity, demand for bandwidth and high transfer rates is continually rising. The market has potential and is accordingly fiercely competitive. Swisscom's ADSL product, marketed by Swisscom and a raft of other providers, is out in front. The millionth ADSL access line was installed back in 2005, and in the same year ((some 300,000)) high-speed Internet access lines were activated over the TV cable network by Cablecom.