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The telecommunications provider is canceling several old offers. Existing customers are annoyed.
In the summer of 2023, Swisscom assured its customers that it would apply “Price certainty”. There will be no general price increase until 2025. And yet it is now becoming more expensive for many existing Swisscom customers.
For example, for a long-time Swisscom customer who had previously paid five francs for her subscription. Now she has to pay almost 15 francs per month. She can cope with these additional ten francs: “I just find it unreasonable that I have to pay three times as much in one fell swoop.”
Other customers are also annoyed by Swisscom’s actions in the SRF consumer magazine “Espresso”. They feel “ripped off” and treated “unfairly”. The emails that reached the editorial team talk about “hidden price increases” and “rip-offs”.
Swisscom: “no price increase”
Swisscom is currently in the process of informing customers about the adjustments on a staggered basis. The company does not disclose how many are affected. But given Swisscom’s size, there are probably several thousand.
When asked, the company emphasized that this was not a price increase. Rather, the offer will be adjusted. Specifically, Swisscom is taking a TV and an Internet subscription off the market and removing the “Multiroom” option, which allowed you to watch TV with an additional television.
This option is still available, but as “Multiroom Max”, which allows up to four additional televisions. The canceled offers are products that have not been available to new customers for a long time, but which existing customers can still use.
Was “price certainty” an empty promise?
Of course, we understand that customers want to stay with their old products, says Swisscom media spokeswoman Annina Merk. “From time to time we have to remove old tariffs from our range.” These old tariffs would generate a lot of additional work in the background and, for example, make the training of employees more complicated.
In such cases, the affected customers would automatically be switched to current products with significantly more performance and would, for example, benefit from more TV channels or higher internet speeds.
Whether the additional service is desired by the affected customers or not: the bottom line is that they will pay significantly more for their Swisscom bill in the future. So there can be no talk of “price certainty” until 2025. However, the company sees no contradiction in this: “We explicitly mentioned in our communication regarding price security that we reserve the right to definitely remove older subscriptions from the market during this time.”