SWITZERLAND | Cell Phones in Switzerland (Plans, Carriers, Vacation)

hey guys welcome back to how to Switzerland Seren here today and in today's video I'm going to be talking all about cell phones in Switzerland so this video is actually episode number five in our series called Switzerland basics so this series is dedicated to those of you watching that are in the process of moving to Switzerland or you're planning on moving to Switzerland or thinking about moving to Switzerland and you want the real basic information in today's video I'm going to be talking all about cell phones because obviously this is something that is one of the first things that you need to get sorted out when you move here I know whenever I make a move to a new country within the first 24 hours that I am making sure that I get a cell phone plan all up and running and I know that when you're in the stress of moving you can sometimes jump into quick decisions and then you can later regret it and it can be kind of hard to change it sometimes or a real pain or expense to change it so I hope with this video you can make a better educated cell phone decision when you first move here so today's video is gonna be you guys in three parts first I'm going to be talking about the device the hardware what you need to know about that second I'm going to be talking about plans and the carriers and then at the end I'm gonna mention what you should do if you are a tourist in Switzerland you're not moving here you're just traveling and I'll put in the time stamp here if you just want to skip ahead to that part so part one the phone itself what do you need to know well the main question most people ask themselves is I already have a phone can I bring it to Switzerland can I use it there is it going to work and of course this is the best thing you can do if you already have a phone I'm sure that you do if you're watching this video you're probably watching it on a phone so silly for me to say but if you have a cell phone already yes you can bring it to Switzerland and use it here but only if it is unlocked so if you live in the United States and you plan with AT&T and in your contract it says that that cell phone will only work with a TMT or only work with a TMT until you've been a customer for two years you need to look into those details if you are not sure if your phone is unlocked or not please find this out before you come to Switzerland before you leave the country because if it is locked they might your carrier might be able to help you but once you're overseas they're not gonna be able to help you a whole lot with getting your phone unlocked so figure out if your phone is locked or not call your carrier ask them if they say it is locked figure out if there is a way that you can get it unlocked you might have to pay a little bit of money to get it unlocked and sometimes that can be worth it but look into that first so the next option if your phone is locked and your carrier sets it will not work in Switzerland it only works on AT&T or Sprint or whatever and you decide then to say sell that phone and come here without a phone and need to get a new one let me tell you the best way to do that of course you can get cellphones directly from the cellphone carriers but you guys you know I'm a budget girl I try to be sustainable I try to you know be financially responsible and that's why I'm definitely going to not recommend to you to go out and just buy a brand new phone what I would recommend and again this is not sponsored but go to revenge OCH this is a really really great company that sells secondhand cell phones they sell all sorts of Apple products Samsung products basically like the the kind of electronics that people actually want they're a great company I bought two iPhones from them one laptop and two Apple watches this is oh I have a lot of experience as a customer paying customer of this company and I definitely would recommend them so I have an iPhone 7 plus only paid a couple hundred bucks for this and it works amazingly well so I would recommend that you go online to remember that CH or they also have stores get yourself a phone they'll all be unlocked I'll be ready to go and then you can take that unlocked phone and go and find your plan okay third option you're like Sarah my phone is locked I can't use it I don't want a secondhand phone because I want the latest and the greatest phone let me tell you what your option is of course you can straight-up buy it from the cellphone company you can walk in and pay your $1,000 1,000 Swiss francs for your latest iPhone you can just buy it outright and then it will be unlocked or what most people tend to do is they go to the cellphone carrier they pick out a phone nowadays I think you can put basically no money or like one Swiss franc down as a down payment and then they will divide up the price of the phone and bill you for that with your cell phone bill so say you're paying 50 bucks a month for your cell phone service they will then add the $50 or 50 francs a month to it to pay off your iPhone if you don't pay it all at once and sorry the personal finance and nerdom you just has to say that i wouldn't recommend this even though this is very popular because say it takes you two years to pay off that one thousand Swiss franc iPhone at the end of the two years guys it's gonna be worth absolutely nowhere near what you paid for it that's called depreciation that phone will have depreciated a whole lot and the most you'll be able to get for it is like a couple hundred francs if you're lucky so just go directly and buy second-hand sorry I got it I got a push a sustainability circular economy and save you money okay I put this down I'm like waving this phone around so the next thing you have your device next thing to do is find a carrier so in Switzerland you have three major carriers that you will hear everybody talk about and they are salt sunrise and Swisscom so in my personal opinion it seems like most Swiss people are heavily biased towards Swiss calm and if you tell them that you don't want to go with Swiss calm a lot of people look at you like you're crazy that's what would happen to me and but yet those are the three main carriers and most Swiss people will probably tell you to go with Swisscom but it is the most expensive one so those are the three main carriers there will also be the more I guess normal priced higher priced carriers but they do they do have a few budget carriers in Switzerland as well you can get a cell phone from Aldi I think even from Lidl from Colt from me grow there's a lot of smaller other not smaller companies but less popular cell phone carriers out there and actually most of these small companies they buy access to the Swiss Tom cell phone tower network coverage so you're often getting the exact same coverage just without the name brand so of course this part is pretty personal and up to you how much you want to pay every single month what kind of plan you are looking for but my personal recommendation guys would be to go for an unlimited everything plan these are pretty popular in Switzerland so that means you can get unlimited data calls and text messages for one flat fee and I would really recommend this because although it might sound more budget-friendly to get like the 19 franc a month plan you're gonna get nickeled and dimed if you go over on your wireless data or you go over on your phone calls and those bills can really add up so in my personal experience here and I'm a girl who's done that I've done like the budget plan thinking I'm gonna save money and then I end up getting a bill that is much higher than if I would have just gone for the unlimited everything plan so you probably want to look at the unlimited everything plans and these range from let me see here what do we say about 40 francs on the low end from all the salt and about up to 65 on the high end from summer from Swisscom and sunrise so these are unlimited everything within Switzerland you can expect to pay anywhere between 40 francs and 65 francs but again that is only within Switzerland this will add up if you to add Europe the rest of your health of North America or other countries at the point that although that is one of the downsides of Switzerland since 2017 all Europeans anyone in the EU or IEA does not get charged data roaming anymore so if you are German and you have a German cellphone plan and you go to France you don't have to worry about paying more money because you're in France people in you really get a nice perk there but here in Switzerland we are not a part of any of those agreements so if you have a Swiss cell phone plan and you go to Germany you can expect to be charged roaming at my plan at sunrise it's one franc 90 per day for like a limited amount of data and phone calls but that has really worked for us okay another thing you need to keep in mind when you're picking out a cell phone plan is your age so in Switzerland if you are under 30 you will be able to benefit from a good amount of discounts most cell phone carriers do have a special price for people under 30 which is really nice because I know in a lot of places you have to be like a student to get a discount or stuff like that but most of the carrier's here will offer you a discount if you're under 30 which is really nice so since I'm under 30 I do get a discount so I have a plan at sunrise and I get 10 bucks off every single month the plan I have is unlimited everything normally costs 65 francs but I only pay 55 which is really nice and I also get some other benefits so this is something you can ask about what additional benefits come with signing up with them so for me since I'm under 30 and I have a plan at sunrise I get for example 50% off my SBB half fare and that's like a 90 franc value every single year which is really nice so that's the half fare on that gives you half off public transportation the cellphone company covers half of it and I can actually then pay that in my cellphone bill if I want it's like five or eight bucks a month not a lot at all so those are basically my recommendations when you're picking out a plan make sure you see if there any discounts you can qualify for try to go for an unlimited anything so you don't have any unexpected bills and the last thing that you really need to keep in mind especially if you are new in Switzerland you are an expat here you're just immigrating here please get yourself a no-contract plan you want to ask about contract terms you have to be really careful about this because I've made this mistake before and I didn't realize I had signed like a three-year cellphone contract and then to get out of it it cost me almost 400 Swiss francs to get out of this contract so again I'm gonna keep talking about sunrise because that's what we have but in my cell phone plan it is a no contract plan I can cancel at any time so if I leave the country or another carrier comes out with a better price I can switch very easily so I would recommend to you especially if you're new here because you don't know if things are gonna change or your situation is gonna change and you might have to leave you don't want to have to cancel a bunch of cell phone plans you know to the tune of like 400 Swiss francs per line so just be careful about contract terms ask for no contract if it's possible so let's say you did your research about cell phone plans I would definitely recommend that you look that up online and get all your information most of the carrier's let you just really simply pick your pants plate pick them pick your plan and then you can just click and they'll mail you a SIM card and you can pop it in your unlocked phone or they'll mail you the phone with the SIM card very very easy to get started I would recommend that you do all the signing up online just because in those stores sometimes it can take very long to get things done you guys know how it is if you've ever been in a cell phone store it can be a little bit stressful of an experience and often people want to upsell you and they want to encourage you to like add a TV and add your internet and all that kind of stuff and you might end up getting up sold into a plan so I definitely recommend go online I can recommend sunrise what we use they have a really really easy signup process again no contracts great discounts great perks and when it comes to coverage iPhone that I haven't had any kind of issue even though Swiss people will probably tell me that sunrise doesn't have as good of coverage as Swiss tongue I've never had an issue at all so that's about it for if you are moving here that is all that you need to know I hope that helped you understand what you can expect to pay and what you should look for but let's say you are visiting Switzerland for a week or we can have what do you need to do to have a cell phone to be connected it's obviously really important when you're traveling to be able to get online to look things up to be able to make phone calls so the first thing that I would recommend is that you look at your current cell phone carrier so say you have AT&T or Verizon or whatever talk to them and see if you can set up a plan before you come and visit Europe or Switzerland because if you just come over here and start making calls and using Internet data you can really get a very high cell phone bill so definitely see if there's something that you can add on to your plan for the week or for the month before you come over here that's going to be your absolute best bet and if your cell phone company doesn't have an option like that or it's too expensive bring your phone and get a local SIM card when you get here so you can just pop into any cell phone store you can pop into sunrise you'll see sunrise stores everywhere salt stores or Swisscom store and buy yourself a prepaid SIM card that has data on it and everything like that it's not going to be like dirt cheap but I think it's a good option to get yourself connected while you are here and avoid super-high roaming charges but again your phone needs to be unlocked if you come over here with a locked phone and you spend 50 bucks on a SIM card and you put it in it's not gonna work and that's going to be really frustrating for everybody so make sure if you are coming over that you have at least one unlocked phone for your trip you know when Matias and I travel we don't ever really use data on two phones we just get it on one so one person can kind of navigate and all of that but you're not can have a problem with like finding a place to get a SIM card or having network coverage or anything like that switz lim has really really good network coverage actually read that Swit Slim has the highest amount of smartphones per capita probably every single person in this country close to every single person in this country has one and so there is a lot of cell phone coverage everywhere you go all right you guys that is it for today's video I will link some of the stuff I talked about in the description box down below to help you find prepaid cards and plans and phones and all that kind of stuff if you have any specific questions leave them in the comments I will do my best to answer them otherwise for all the Swiss people watching please help people out in the comments that have questions I think it's really awesome when you guys are able to kind of help each other and help us with answering the content so that's it for today's video and I'll talk to you guys soon bye [Music]

Channel: How To Switzerland

Views: 12,900

Rating: 4.8778625 out of 5

Keywords: switzerland, swiss, how to, life in switzerland, move to switzerland, moving to switzerland, sarah nourse, sarah nurse, sara nourse, swiss life

Id: 3-wtE9qfoeI

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 25 2019