Swiss telecoms firms fight demand for blackout coverage 

Telecoms firms have been asked to cover power blackouts KEYSTONE/© KEYSTONE / GAETAN BALLY

A proposed law, which would force Swiss telecoms providers to guarantee coverage during blackouts, has ended its consultation phase. 

The government wants telecoms firms to install thousands of batteries and diesel generators at an estimated cost of CHF145 million per year. 

Swiss mobile phone networks should continue to function even after a major power outage. The proposed measures were completely rejected by the industry during the consultation process. 

The bill calls on Swisscom, Sunrise and Salt to maintain certain telecommunications services for up to 72 hours without interruption or for 14 days in the event of cyclical interruptions. By way of comparison: today, certain mobile phone sites can only continue to operate for up to one hour without power. 

Blackout costs billions

The federal government argues that an outage of the mobile phone network would cause enormous damage, estimated at over CHF16 billion. Emergency calls could be cancelled, more deaths and injuries as well as safety problems would result, and some companies would no longer be able to work properly. 

The planned amendment to the Telecommunications Services Ordinance would mean that the three mobile phone providers would have to install batteries or diesel generators or purchase mobile devices at their total of over 9,000 antenna sites in the event of an emergency. The federal government expects this to cost telecoms providers a total of CHF145 million per year. 

The federal government is therefore assuming price increases for mobile phone users of around CHF1.50 per subscription and month. The bill also provides for telecoms companies to be allowed to restrict the transmission of video services via the Internet in an emergency to relieve the strain on the networks. 

The telecoms industry says the proposals “are not realisable in practice”, as the Swiss Telecommunications Association (Asut) wrote. It would not be possible for the telecoms industry to set up its own power supply. It is also a “luxury solution”. In an emergency, the Confederation wants to enable not only text messages or short telephone calls, but also access to the Internet. 

Asut criticised the fact that some of the proposed measures lacked a legal basis. The association proposed a round table to tackle the hardening of critical infrastructures with all parties involved. 

Demands “too expensive”

The largest network operator considered the measures demanded by the Federal Council to be “oversized and technically only partially feasible, too expensive and also not sustainable due to the use of diesel generators”. According to a press release, Swisscom is currently considering improving the power autonomy of its systems by up to four hours based on the latest battery technology. 

The rest of the economy echoed similar sentiments. The business association Economiesuisse explained that companies are interested in a secure supply of telecoms services, but energy self-sufficiency in an emergency cannot be the responsibility of the demand side. It criticised insufficient dialogue between the relevant parties – the federal government, cantons, energy industry and telecoms sector. 

The Federal Council received fundamental support from the cantons. From the point of view of crisis management and civil defence, they welcome the efforts to strengthen telecommunications services. Certain cantons called for some additions. For example, the population’s access to the major Swiss news portals via mobile phones must be guaranteed even in the event of a blackout. 

Translated from German by DeepL/mga 

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here. 

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].