Ombudscom 2024: the most honest 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 per 100,000 customers?

In 2024 Swisscom had roughly 101 cases at Ombudscom. That sounds like a lot. Sunrise had 262 cases, Salt 145. Digital Republic: 0 cases.

Without context, that's misleading. Swisscom has over 6 million mobile customers, Sunrise around 3.1 million, Salt 1.9 million, Digital Republic roughly 60,000. So we scale to 100,000 customers:

Once normalised, the picture is clear: even though Swisscom has the most customers and therefore more cases in absolute terms, its per-customer rate is the lowest of any major Swiss provider. That is a real quality marker.

Our tier system

Not every Swiss provider publishes customer numbers. So we sort providers into 4 tiers:

All providers in 2024 at a glance

Sorted by rate (where known), otherwise by absolute cases. Tier D (0 cases) on top.

≈ = estimate. Parent companies don't disclose Tier B provider customer counts separately. Our estimates are based on media research and industry reports (OFCOM, ASUT).

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, Dimoco, Echovox (value-added service providers), not the mobile providers directly. We only count telecom-service cases per provider.
• Customer-base estimates are error-prone: for Tier B (≈), the real rate can deviate up to ±30% from our estimate. We flag this clearly.
• Tier D doesn't guarantee perfection: "0 cases" means "no escalation was needed", not "no complaints". Smaller providers statistically have fewer occasions for disputes.

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