UPC Switzerland

» see upc.ch as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Swiss cable worked differently from the television I grew up with. By the mid-1990s the coaxial network in Switzerland passed almost every apartment in the country, so when broadband arrived there it arrived through the television cable instead of the telephone line. Cablecom owned most of that cable. It was assembled in 1994 out of Rediffusion and a set of independent local operators, under a consortium that included Siemens and Swisscom.

The ownership then changed more often than the network did. NTL bought Cablecom in 2000, on the theory that a British cable group could run a Swiss one, and sold it again in 2003 to a group of banks and private investors once its own finances gave out. Liberty Global Europe took it over on 30 September 2005, and the public offering that had been prepared for Cablecom was withdrawn.

The renaming came later. Cablecom was relaunched as upc cablecom in April 2011, and from 25 May 2016 the cablecom half of the name was dropped. By the middle of 2019 UPC was supplying 1.1 million Swiss customers with around 2.4 million separate services, about a million of them television subscriptions. Revenue in 2018 was 1.296 billion Swiss francs and the company employed roughly 1,500 people.

The name did not die of anything that happened to the network. It died because the company that owned it bought a competitor, and then had to pick one of the two brands it suddenly held.

~ the dossier ~

~ two names, one network ~

The merger happened twice, in opposite directions. On 27 February 2019 Sunrise announced it would buy UPC Switzerland from Liberty Global for 6.3 billion Swiss francs, in a transaction its own announcement framed as building a national challenger to Swisscom. That purchase never completed, and it was formally called off on 18 December 2019.

Eight months later Liberty Global ran the same deal backwards. In August 2020 it announced it would buy Sunrise itself for 7.4 billion dollars, and the acquisition closed that November. The two companies were legally merged into Sunrise UPC LLC the following spring. The combined business kept both brands for a while, and then on 23 May 2022 Sunrise became the principal one, with a new identity built by the agencies Thjnk and Rufus Leonard. Existing UPC customers went on receiving UPC-branded products after that date, which is why the brand faded across the rest of 2022 rather than stopping on the Monday it was retired.

~ what stayed in the ground ~

Nothing was switched off. The coaxial cable that Rediffusion and the local operators had strung is the same cable Sunrise sells over today, and the Swiss homes it reaches, which UPC put at around three million, noticed the change mainly on the invoice.

Liberty Global then finished the story by letting go. In November 2024 it spun Sunrise off as an independent listed company, so the network ended up owned at home rather than from abroad. Three names came and went across those 28 years. The cable has been in the ground since before any of them.

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