I'm starting to look into cell phone option for when I relocate to CH (a few weeks). My job will involve a tremendous amount of traveling, so it will be important to have a phone that works everywhere (US, Australia, Latin/South America, Europe, etc). From what I've read in this forum, Swisscom seems to be the largest provider.

Any thoughts/suggestions as to which provider I should look into?

Orange/Swisscom/Sunrise and the other one.
dave

any Swiss provider will likely have agreements with carriers in other countries. Their network, however, stops on or just after the Swiss border.

Quad-band phone and look at the roaming agreements is where I'd start.

But you knew that - right?

If you're travling a lot then maybe sunrise is the best options.
http://www.sunrise.ch/privatkunden/m...abo_preise.htm
Here you can make additional contracts for Europe, World and so on and then you have cheaper connection fees.
Nico

Have you tried the international sim cards you can get in the UK... They are usually quite cheap and are good for making international calls from virtually anywhere. http://www.oneroam.co.uk/
I used one of them but there are loads available today.
Regards

Cookie monster - you are suggesting a UK sim card for someone who is going to be resident in Switzerland. That means when his Swiss friends call him while he is in Switzerland they will have to pay for a call to the UK, and he'll have to pay for the inbound leg. When he calls his Swiss friends he'll pay handsomely for it (about twice what he'd pay with a Swiss phone). When he roams out of Switzerland then he'll make a small saving by using this UK sim, but probably not enough to offset the additional charges he'll end up paying when he's at home. Then of course throw in GRPS etc...

I'd recommend a provider like Sunrise (or any of them really) for cheap rates at home, and then sign up to their extra plans where you get discounts on roaming in exchange for an extra monthly fee. These plans can pay for themselves with just a few phone calls.

Bottom line is roaming isn't cheap, especially away from Europe - there isn't much we can do about that!

New2luzern - another thing you can do is install a softphone on your laptop and plug in a headset. You can attach a Swiss local number to it, so if you are travelling all you need is internet access and you can effectively take your Swiss local number with you. Works for inbound calls too - just like a local number. I do this myself when I'm travelling. Of course this won't replace the mobile, but the quality is good and the cost is almost nothing - the people you talk to won't even know that you've left the house!

I didnt tell him to buy one from the UK. They do the sim cards everywhere (even Switzerland). And Im sure sunrise is a cheap option for calls in Switzerland. All i was saying is if your using it in different countries, there are special cards designed for international roaming.

There's a prepay outfit called Yallo which seems to be set up for cheap roaming.

You can get the cards at the Post or Media Markt.

https://www.yallo.ch/kp/dyn/web/pub/home/home.do

Visit www.comparis.ch and you will find many stuff there which will help you. Swisscom is a very good provider, but you pay for the good service as well. I will not change to any other provider

From the coverage prospective Swisscom have more sites than any Swiss providers. You can consider this option as a plus if you are travelling or driving a lot within Switzerland. Otherwise in the big cities penetration ratio of all providers are roughly same.
Sunrise and Yallo are more flexible with respect to Tariff.