Although data applications are continuously gaining in importance, mobile phone calls are still a core application of mobile communications. Therefore, they account for 27 percent of our rating.

Already in voice telephony via VoLTE (Voice over LTE), the competition between the three providers takes place at the highest level. Both in the big cities and in the small towns, the three competitors are more or less on a par. Only on the connecting roads do the gaps somewhat widen – although Salt is once again clearly ­catching up compared to the previous year. In practice, the high scores manifest themselves in success rates of 100 or almost 100 percent, short call set-up times and high voice quality. 

As in the previous year, ­Sunrise achieves the shortest call set-up times, which are one second or even less in all test scenarios. But Swisscom and Salt also rank closely ­behind, and in the major cities Salt is even on a par with ­Sunrise.

The high success rates and speech quality scores on Swiss roads and on train journeys through Switzerland mean in practice that travellers can rely on being able to make mobile phone calls on the ­move almost without restriction – and in almost perfect quality. In the tests on Swiss trains, the runners-up Sunrise and Salt have once again caught up significantly compared to last year, while market leader Swisscom maintains its already impressive result from the previous year. In the overall ranking, Sunrise leads the voice discipline by one point ahead of Swisscom.

Apps, messaging, streaming and web surfing are the focus for smartphone users. The share of the data discipline was thus in­creased to 48 percent of the overall score.

The Swiss network operators rank also close to each other in the data discipline. This is clearly evident in the drive and walk tests carried out in large cities, where Swisscom has a razor-thin lead – but Sunrise and Salt are close on the heels of the first-placed company.

Salt manages to catch up with second-placed Sunrise more often than in the previous year. The high level of performance becomes par­ticularly clear in the success rates of the individual data tests. Overall, Swisscom leads in this dis­cipline, with Sunrise and Salt chasing each other for second place, depending on the respective test case. 

In small towns and on ­connecting roads, Swisscom also defends its first place ­sovereignly. In these sce­narios, too, it is remarkable that Salt continues to catch up – in the small towns, the gap to Sunrise is only minor, and on the roads, both providers are on a tie in the overall ranking. 

All in all, the urban-rural ­divide in Switzerland is much less pronounced than in neighbouring countries. If one wants to complain at all at such a high level, ­Sunrise shows slight potential for improvement in the YouTube tests, while Salt could still ­improve a little in the upload and download tests in large ­cities and small towns. 

How­ever, all three Swiss network operators again show very good results in our new “conversational app“ test ­cases – i.e. in the examination of IP-based voice transmissions in corresponding apps – as well as the eGaming test ­aimed at short latency times. Swisscom owes its overall ­victory last, but not least to the wide­spread use of the combination of 5G NR with „4 Carrier Aggregation“ (4CA) in its network.

Data connectivity on railways

Yet another tradition: for ­years, Swiss providers have been showing what almost perfect mobile network ­coverage on trains looks like. The performance of Swisscom, in particular, is once again at the highest level this year. But it is noticeable that Sunrise in particular lags a little behind last year‘s ­performance in this discipline. Thus Salt also manages to overtake its competitor ­Sunrise in this discipline – however, ­also with a few points less than last year. The results here are still very good – but have lost their clear lead over the strongest operators in Austria.

The rollout of 5G is also in full swing in Switzerland. Our targeted analysis of the 5G results shows ­increases for all three Swiss providers compared to their values from the previous year in all ­examined scenarios. However, Salt is catching up particularly clearly in this respect.

In order to shed light on the progress of the strong Swiss providers in their 5G rollouts, we are again looking at the
results of the seven-second download tests from the data discipline as an ­example. The proportions of samples
with 5G and 5G-DSS determined in these tests are also found in a similar way in the other data tests.

The first thing that stands out are the very high data rates, which are well above 800 Mbit/s in many of the scenarios examined. The proportions with 5G have also once again increased significantly for all three providers compared to the previous year. Once again, it is noticeable that in Switzerland only Swisscom relies to a significant extent on the capacity ­distribution technology DSS. In total, this provider also has a high 5G coverage – even on roads and in trains. Where DSS
is used, however, this happens at the ­expense of data rates. It is also impressive how much Salt has increased in all scenarios compared to the previous year.

How much power reaches the customers? Swisscom ­also leads narrowly in crowdsourcing, closely followed by Sunrise and with a slightly larger gap by Salt.

The crowdsourcing analyses provide the same ranking as the overall ranking in Switzerland and as in the data and voice categories. They thus confirm the results of the drive and walk tests – whereby crowdsourcing also always reflects the customers‘ choice of tariff and device. Overall, Swisscom leads again with a two-point advantage over Sunrise. Salt follows in third place, five points behind Sunrise. In terms of broadband quality and time share with broadband, Sunrise ranks just ahead of Swisscom. Salt is ­somewhat more clearly behind the leading duo here.

In terms of coverage reach, Swisscom is again in the lead. The same applies to the examination of data rates (both passive and active) and to the evaluation of ­latencies.

The availability of HD voice is again a neck-and-neck race between Sunrise and Swisscom, with the former narrowly winning. At a generally high level, Sunrise leads in stability just ahead of the equally strong providers Swisscom and Salt here.