How to Get Home Internet in Switzerland: A 5-Step Guide

First, I have to apologize in the unlikely event that anyone’s been waiting with bated breath for a new missive from me. I’ve been distracted by the boys starting school, and more recently (this week and last), by moving from our temporary furnished apartment to our new, permanent apartment, a gorgeous loft where our furniture is mostly cardboard boxes. Our interior design aesthetic is now “Manhattan Hoarder.” More about all of these exciting developments coming soon!

I’ve also been offline until just a little while ago, because we didn’t have home internet, and my fingers are too fat and clumsy to attempt to blog from my phone.

On that note, How do you get a home internet connection set up in Switzerland, anyhow?

It’s very simple! Follow the five steps below and you will be all set.

1. Choose a Provider. There are four big players among Swiss ISPs: Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt, and Yallo (which I associate with someone yelling “Yallo?” into a phone with a suburban Albany accent, but perhaps it’s a play on Yellow; Salt was formerly known as Orange). These are all major telecoms, so they’ll offer similarly bewildering bundles of home telephony, cable TV, landline, and mobile phone packages. All will have similarly dishonest introductory offers for services you probably don’t want, that will expire before you remember to cancel them and your auto-payment auto-triples or auto-quadruples.

There are probably half a dozen additional providers that are just ISPs, but I’m not young or tech savvy or cool enough to pay much attention to these cutting-edge types. I never went with Monkeybrains or Monsterface or Weirdo-E-Libertarian or any of the other “cool” ISPs in San Francisco, either. I just seethed quietly while cutting AT&T a massive monthly check and periodically giving my router a serial reboot, like any other normal consumer.

In the end, you will, like me, choose Swisscom, because: It’s what your previous temporary apartment had; the vaguely nationalist nomenclature will suggest enormity, ubiquity, and competence; and you will have done enough research and comparison shopping to tell you that you can’t stand comparison shopping for internet service providers and would rather just be done with it.

2. Notice That it Takes at Least Ten Days Advance Notice to Install Swiss Internet. The best time to do this is late on the Thursday or Friday before the Monday when you are scheduled to move into your new apartment, when you remember that you didn’t pick an ISP yet despite an hour or two of annoying online research two weeks before.

So when you’ve got that done:

3. Place an Order Online, and receive a confirmation e-mail informing you that the ISP will be in touch in a few days to get your contract finalized.

4. Follow up With the ISP, ten days later, when you’re squatting among cardboard boxes in your new home, on the day before the “earliest available” activation date you chose online a week and change ago, when you realize that the ISP never got back to you. This is also when you will learn that, auto-generated confirmation e-mail notwithstanding, the ISP has no record of your order in your system and has no idea that you exist. You have no contract in place. Set up your contract over the phone, a process that takes a little over 90 minutes.

During this process you will be upsold to a more expensive package that may or may not actually be available at your address, with a tempting introductory offer you will forget to cancel in a year’s time.

You will also get a follow up call, two e-mails, and a text, shortly thereafter, asking you to upload a photograph of your passport or Swiss residence permit, a process that is successful after only thirty attempts. The issue may be that uploaded photographs are strictly forbidden from including any glare, and both passports and Swiss residence permits are phenomenally shiny little documents. Or not.

Anyway, they’ll call back twice to find out if you’re finished uploading the images while you’re trying to do so for the fifth and seventh times, and will stay on the line for the next 23 tries.

5. Begin Receiving Extremely Frequent SMS and E-Mail Messages from Your Provider. Note that although the ISP’s website has an English option, and the customer service people (more about whom below) speak English with varying degrees of proficiency, you can only get official communications from your ISP in one of the big three Swiss national languages. Despite the fact that the ISP totally didn’t notice that you placed an order online twelve days ago, they somehow remembered that you checked a box asking them to communicate with you in Italian when you did so, so your texts and inbox are now filled with Italian messages.

Ooops, that’s five! Maybe this process wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be. Carrying on:

5. Notice That Your Text Messages Contain Conflicting (Italian) Information. After requesting your original activation date over the phone, receive three messages noting that your activation date will take place 1) The day before you requested; 2) a day later than you requested, and 3) two days later than you requested. To get that cleared up…

5. Speak with Three Additional Customer Service Representatives, a process that should take no more than 180 minutes. During the penultimate of these phone calls, you will fail to be informed that your request to have your hardware (router, cable box) delivered to your home was canceled by one of the five people to whom you have spoken; you are now scheduled to pick it up yourself, at a location to be disclosed via QR code you will receive via SMS the day after the technician is scheduled to come to your house (now a full three days later than the start date you requested). As you call back one more time to clarify our story thus far:

5. Get Yelled at by a French Speaking Woman. When you express discontent with the inconsistent information and shifting targets you have received, a customer service representative (technically the last one you will speak with on the phone, but more on that below) with a pronounced French accent (the others appeared to be mostly Portuguese and Italian speakers) will respond with this pinnacle of customer care: “Eh?! Why you cry to me?! Your Internet will come the 30^th. Not before.” This date, incidentally, is the latest of the many that have been suggested.

Thankfully, this phone call will take no longer than 45 minutes.

5. Pick Up Your Router at a Convenience Store. This process involves flashing your QR code, which has mysteriously appeared ahead of schedule,  to a lone clerk who will be forced to abandon her counter, to the discontent of a line of commuters buying cigarettes, lottery tickets, takeaway coffees, and newspapers, to root around the back of the shop somewhere. But she’ll find it eventually and sell you a decent $3.50 caffe ristretto while she’s at it.

5. Have a Surprisingly Attractive Serb Plug In Your Router. I don’t go for men, but even I could tell that Ivan, the technician who showed up at my house to activate our Internet Box, looked like he could have a side gig dancing in the Castro in his underpants. His arrival was like the setup gag to a pornographic comedy; Jessica was even in the shower. Anyhow, he’ll be taciturn, extremely soft spoken, and polite as he tells you how stressful his job can get.

This interaction will take less time than literally any of the customer service calls you’ve experienced to date, and you will receive an invoice via e-mail within seconds.

And, finally, Point 5:

5. Call Technical Support Six Hours Later Because Your Internet Doesn’t Work. Technical support, unlike customer service, will be polite, apologetic, and, apparently, competent. You will talk to them for ten minutes or so, during which time they will magically command your router to do its job from behind the scenes somewhere.

And that’s it! Happy blogging!