On 27 May 2026, the Swiss Federal Council opened a consultation on amendments to telecommunications legislation, tasking the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (DETEC) and the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM/BAKOM) with revising the Telecommunications Act (TCA) to better protect networks against cyberthreats. The centrepiece is a new statutory power: authorities could impose measures — including restrictions on "high-risk" suppliers — if geopolitical risks materialise. The package explicitly aligns Switzerland with the European Union's 5G security toolbox.
This is a notable shift for a country that has, until now, stayed deliberately vendor-neutral. Switzerland never banned Huawei or ZTE. Its operators were left to choose: Swisscom and Salt built their 5G radio networks largely on Ericsson and Nokia, while Sunrise has used Huawei equipment. The new bill does not change that overnight. What it changes is the legal architecture — it gives the executive a switch it can flip later.
The case for the switch
The strongest argument for the reform is honest and worth stating plainly. A small, deeply networked economy that hosts global finance, pharma and multilateral institutions is an attractive target, and 5G cores are the nervous system through which a hostile actor could surveil or disrupt at scale. The EU's reasoning is grounded: in its June 2023 communication on toolbox implementation, the European Commission concluded that Huawei and ZTE "represent in fact materially higher risks than other 5G suppliers," not because of where they are headquartered alone, but because they are subject to intrusive third-country national-intelligence laws. A government that lacks any legal trigger to act when the threat picture darkens is genuinely exposed — and discovering that gap mid-crisis is the worst time to legislate.
The Federal Council's framing reflects this. Rather than a blanket import ban, the consultation proposes a conditional power tied to geopolitical risk, plus operational hardening: operators would be pushed to diversify their supplier base to improve resilience, and Swisscom, Salt, Sunrise and full mobile virtual network operators would be required to run their network operations centres and security operations centres exclusively on Swiss soil. The Council notes that a sufficient legal basis already exists for several of these measures at the ordinance level.
Why the design matters more than the headline
Here is where a pro-innovation, proportionate-regulation lens earns its keep. The EU experience is a cautionary tale about how toolboxes harden into bans. The toolbox was adopted in January 2020 as a flexible, risk-based framework. Yet by 2024, eleven of the 27 member states had used legal powers to impose outright restrictions on high-risk suppliers, and the Commission moved from "member states may" toward treating Huawei and ZTE as presumptively excludable. A framework sold as conditional and evidence-based drifted, in practice, toward a country-of-origin rule.
That drift carries real costs that rarely make the press release. Forced rip-and-replace of installed equipment is expensive and slow — costs that operators pass to consumers or absorb at the expense of rural coverage and next-generation rollout. Reducing the field of viable RAN vendors to two or three suppliers does not obviously increase security; it can concentrate systemic risk, because a single flaw or supply shock now propagates across the whole market. Switzerland's own consultation rightly emphasises diversification — but a high-risk-vendor trigger pulls in the opposite direction, narrowing choice. Those two instincts need to be reconciled in the statute, not left for a future cabinet to balance under pressure.
Getting proportionality into the text
The virtue of the Swiss approach is that it is, so far, a power rather than a prohibition. That is the right altitude — but powers are only as proportionate as their guardrails. Three things should survive the consultation if the reform is to protect networks without chilling investment.
- A genuine evidence threshold. "Geopolitical risk" is elastic. The trigger should require a documented, vendor-specific risk assessment — technical and legal exposure, not nationality as a proxy — before any restriction bites, consistent with the toolbox's own risk-based logic.
- Due process and proportionality review. Any restriction order should be reasoned, time-limited, subject to appeal before the Federal Administrative Court, and paired with realistic transition periods and cost-sharing so that mandated swaps do not quietly defund coverage obligations.
- A diversification-first default. Where resilience is the actual goal, multi-vendor requirements and SOC localisation deliver more security per franc than exclusion, and they keep the supplier market competitive.
Switzerland is not in the EU, and that independence is an asset here. It can adopt the toolbox's analytical rigour — the risk criteria, the network-of-centres model — without importing the political momentum that turned a flexible instrument into a de facto origin ban. The consultation period is the moment to lock that distinction into law.
The Federal Council has identified a real gap and proposed a measured way to fill it. The danger is not the reform itself but its trajectory: conditional powers have a habit of becoming standing prohibitions. If Bern keeps the trigger narrow, evidence-bound and reviewable, it can be more secure than its neighbours and more open than them at the same time. That is the version worth legislating.