The Swiss price for connectivity

In Switzerland, if you are staying in a hotel you have a choice: you can either buy 24 hours of Internet connectivity, or offer yourself a decent dinner. The price is not that different.

I spent last night in a hotel in Bern, the Swiss capital. And wanted to connect and send a few e-mails. There was a LAN cable on the desk, and logos in the hall announcing a WiFi hotspot covering the whole building. I tried out both. Here are the prices asked for the service, expressed in Swiss Francs (1 CHF = 0.8 USD = 0.65 euro). The cable connection was provided by Quadriga (the first option is for 24 hours of connection):

The WiFi hotspot was managed by Swisscom Mobile:

In Switzerland I can get a home monthly DSL subscription for as little as 30 or 40 Francs, depending on the provider. In other words: the fees asked by Quadriga and Swisscom are absurdities bordering on legalized theft. Nor was the hotel a cheap one. It's actually part of a casino complex and is rated among the best in the city; rooms cost a sizable amount. The last five or six hotels where I stayed all had free LAN or free WiFi or both. But those hotels were in California, New York, Austria and Turkey, not in Switzerland which, despite the high rate of Internet penetration and broadband subscribers has not yet entered the era of real telecom competition and is rather backward when it comes to matching the actual Internet usage of an increasingly mobile population - or maybe it's just an iteration of the "milk the customer until you can" approach to marketing.

Meanwhile FON, the grassroots WiFi network started a few months ago  by Spanish entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky (see previous post) has just past the mark of 20'000 registered members globally - and as many hotspots: members will get free connectivity where it's available, and non-member will probably pay something like 2 euros per 24 hours. That's a reasonable 3 CHF.

Comments

[Steph]

I had a similar nasty surprise the other day when I went to Starbucks with a friend, tempted by the nice "hotspot" signs all over the place.

I connected to the network, tried to load a page in my browser, and reached a page inviting me to use my credit card or my Swisscom mobile account.

Irony: the place was covered by the free Lausanne wifi network. Unfortunately, my iBook doesn't seem to want to connect. Maybe a setting problem on my side -- but I didn't have any problems at LIFT, or when I go over to people's places.

[Pascal Rossini]

Hi Bruno, I have Swisscom unlimited card, I paid chf 79 for 1 Go per month, everywhere, I can connect my laptop to the UMTS, wlan swisscom or GPRS network, also on top of the Matterhorn :-).

[BG]

You're right Pascal, there are other options, but my point was about the prices of connectivity in hotels, which is absurd in its own right. BTW, concerning "Unlimited": it doesn't work with Macs; its software overwrites some of your drivers when you install it on a PC; and other such issues.

[Pascal Rossini]

I totally agree at this point, Wifi price in hotel are absurd, like phone price.

[Urs Naegeli]

Why don't you use a good PDA and your mobile phone with GPRS or HSCSD for mailing etc.? It's cheaper (not even 79.-) and running virtually everywhere! I am using since 1999 a good old Psion 5mx (the best PDA ever made, with a very good keyboard) and an actual mobile phone and can mail from weherever I want. So I don't need the overpriced services from Hotels etc. I guess we will never change tourism in Switzerland, it's always about lot of money for little service. And by the way: the Swiss are not so much a mobile society as you may think...