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It's not exact... There are no concurrence in Switzerland because there is only one Cable-provider (Cablecom). So, prices are really high compare to other countries, for example, France. Broadband cost 50-70 CHF per month (~45-60$).

There is some competition because of the ADSL wich is supported by many other provider(Swisscom or Sunrise). ADSL broadband is a bit more expensive than Cable.

In city, there is independant provider, managed by the city itself. This is the main advantage.

Swisscom is essential Vodafone Switzerland which is part of Vodafone Global one of the largest, if not the largest mobile network provider, in the world.

Swisscom

The closest I've seen to this is a display option on Swisscom phones that tells you which municipal area you're in (Bern, Zurich, etc.) One would hope that nobody would ever get _that_ lost :)

So, and what exactly stops me from using sms on a phone without built in mp3 player, the capability to watch movies and the possibility to edit word/excel documents? The beauty of sms is its simplicity.

What failure? Please elaborate on what you think is a failure.

For starters: They weren't able to lure any major cellphone manufacturer in. Big suprise: They didn't want to be OEM manufacturers for a Microsoft branded phone. So they turned to the network providers and where able to cut a deal with Orange. A couple month later deals with Swisscom as well as T-Mobile to release a Microsoft powered phone fell appart, due to bad bugs, which they weren't able to resolve. You can read some of Orange SPV reviews for yourself. In general there seem to be a few zealots, which consider this to be a good phone, despite all it's limitations. In essence:

Battery life is barely sufficient to last a day

Bugs crash the phone on occasion

After which it requires 40 seconds+ to boot and connect

You can't dial your synchronised Outlook contacts directly (this might, or might not be fixed, alas it doesn't thing high praise on the much touted integration)

There are very, very reasonable security concerns

...

I wouldn't exactly call this a roaring success for the Microsoft Smartphone platform.

Add to that the absolute miniscule marketshare in comparision to Symbian.

This might change of course, if Microsoft pours billions and billions of $ into this market, but there's certainly no guarantee (especially since the telecom industry fears nothing more then deviating from standards and Microsoft has a rotten track record in this respect).

So, yeah: Given all those reasons I'd call Microsofts Smartphone Platform a spectacular failure to date.

The same goes with mobile operators. At least Orange does exactly the same thing. If you step over the usual treshold, they ring you up and ask if everything is ok. IIRC, Swisscom did the same thing but that ended in a nice story in the press where someone used his mobile abroad above common use because his wife had a heart attack. He was organising everything by phone and wamms, he was locked of the networks... beeing in the big mess he didn't see the short message from his operator warning him...

This is a translation (without permission) from a blurb in todays Neue Zurcher Zeitung regarding introduction of a new Microsoft Powered cell phone to be introduced by Swisscom.

[...] While Orange integrated their customers into bug hunting, Swisscom is still waiting until the first software update is rolled out.

Currently engineers at Swisscom, Microsoft and HTC (the manufacturer) are trying to determine why the phone doesn't ring on incoming calls[...]

I know, that this is slightly offtopic. But would you trust such a watch to provide the correct time of day?

rats! And I was sure you was talking about the phone company from hell .

Else then that, I couldn't have expressed so eloquently what's so damn wrong with the current privatization blitz.