Ombudscom 2024: the hard numbers on Swiss telecom providers

What is Ombudscom?

The ombudscom Foundation is the official, independent dispute-resolution body for the Swiss telecom industry. It was established in 2008 under the Telecommunications Act (Art. 12c TCA) and is funded by provider fees, not by the state or directly by the providers.

A provider must take part in the dispute-resolution procedure when a customer initiates one. That is a legal obligation. Ombudscom drafts settlement proposals and mediates between customers and providers.

When does a case reach Ombudscom?

• The customer has already contacted the provider in writing
• The dispute could not be resolved
• The last contact was no more than 12 months ago
• No court is handling the matter

In other words: an Ombudscom case is not a regular support ticket. It is an escalated dispute where the provider's internal customer service has failed.

Why does this count as a quality signal?

Trustpilot and Google are self-selected: angry people write a one-star review, satisfied people usually stay silent. Ombudscom cases are different:

• Formal process: the customer has to actively file the case, justify it in writing, and submit documents. Nobody does that out of boredom.
• Providers had a chance: a case only reaches Ombudscom when the provider could not or would not fix it internally.
• Neutral third party: Ombudscom judges on the facts, not emotionally.
• Hard number: no star average, no review bombing. Just: how often escalation was necessary.

So Ombudscom cases don't measure satisfaction. They measure service-recovery failure. That's a much sharper signal.

Why we don't show a rate per customer

Swisscom 101 cases, Sunrise 262, Salt 145, Digital Republic 0. Without context this is misleading, because Swisscom has millions of customers and Digital Republic tens of thousands. At first glance, a rate per 100'000 customers looks like the fix.

The problem: only the three large providers publish reliable customer numbers. For most MVNOs and sub-brands, those would be estimates with a ±30%+ margin of error. A claim like "4.6× better than the industry" built on such estimates is fake precision.

That's why we show only absolute numbers from the official annual report. As a rough yardstick: the industry average is 7.8 cases per 100'000 mobile subscriptions (933 cases / ~12M subscriptions CH).

All providers in 2024 at a glance

Providers with 0 cases first, then ascending by case count.

We show only absolute case counts. Normalising per 100'000 customers would be possible in principle, but it requires reliable customer-base numbers that many providers do not publish. As a reference: industry average = 933 cases / roughly 12M mobile subscriptions CH = about 7.8 cases per 100'000 customers.

Important caveats

• Escalated cases only: most unhappy customers never reach Ombudscom. This is the tip of the iceberg.
• Value-added services counted separately: some cases concern third parties like Paycon or Echovox (value-added service providers), not the mobile providers directly. We only count telecom-service cases per provider.
• 0 cases doesn't mean perfection: "no escalations" does not mean "no complaints". Smaller providers statistically have fewer occasions for disputes.
• Absolute numbers need context: Swisscom has more cases than Digital Republic, but also 100× more customers. We deliberately leave the judgement call to you.

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