Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.

The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!

I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.

The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.

This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.

So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.

Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.

I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.

At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.

In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.

What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.

Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.