Switzerland is about to do something regulators rarely do: publicly reverse a completed technology mandate. The Federal Office of Communications (BAKOM/OFCOM) is expected to grant SRG SSR a new FM broadcasting licence in August 2026, letting the public broadcaster switch its transmitters back on for the first time since it went all-digital on December 31, 2024. Operational tests were approved on July 20, 2026, and full broadcasts are slated to resume in mid-autumn at an initial cost of roughly CHF 6.6 million a year (BAKOM; Radio World).
A Decade-Long Plan, Undone in Two Years
The FM phase-out was not improvised. Switzerland's broadcasters and regulators agreed on a DAB+ migration path stretching back to 2014, and the Federal Council granted what it called a "final" FM licence extension on October 25, 2023, pushing the shutdown to the end of 2026 "to give radio broadcasters more time for the migration process" (BAKOM). SRG SSR kept its side of the bargain, switching off all 17 of its FM programmes across the country's language regions on December 31, 2024.
What followed was a real-world test of whether Swiss listeners were actually ready. They weren't. SRG's own channels lost about six percentage points of market share in the first half of 2025 after the DAB+-only switch (persoenlich.com), and the broadcaster told lawmakers it had shed more than 500,000 listeners — while FM-only private stations picked up roughly 300,000 of them, largely because a meaningful share of car radios still cannot receive DAB+ (heise online). On December 9, 2025, the Council of States voted 21–18 with 5 abstentions to postpone the nationwide FM sunset from the end of 2026 to the end of 2031, following the National Council's own vote earlier in the parliamentary session to abandon the hard 2026 cutoff altogether (heise online).
Steelmanning the Case for Sticking With DAB+
Before calling this a straightforward regulatory failure, it's worth taking the DAB+ case seriously. Digital radio genuinely is the better technology: it uses spectrum more efficiently, supports more stations per frequency block, and delivers better sound quality than analogue FM. Switzerland's private broadcasters spent a decade and real capital building out DAB+ infrastructure on the understanding that FM would end on a fixed date — several dutifully switched off FM early. The Federal Council made exactly this point when it rejected an earlier attempt to halt the sunset, noting the plan dated to 2014 and that private broadcasters "were originally on board" with ending FM by 2024 (Radio World). A government that reopens a settled deadline every time a transition gets bumpy risks teaching every regulated industry that firm dates are negotiable — which is its own kind of policy cost.
The Proportionality Problem
But that argument assumes the original timeline was calibrated to reality, and the listener data says it wasn't. A regulatory mandate that strands roughly a third of in-car radios — the single most common way Swiss commuters actually listen — isn't a minor rollout hiccup; it's a signal that the switchover was sequenced around an industry deadline rather than consumer readiness. SRG SSR's 500,000-listener exodus is not a broadcaster failing to adapt — it's the market registering that the infrastructure people actually own hadn't caught up to the infrastructure regulators wanted them to use. That is precisely the scenario proportionate regulation is supposed to guard against: setting an output goal (universal digital radio access) is defensible; forcing the switch by government fiat on a fixed calendar, irrespective of how many receivers can actually receive the new signal, is not.
The fix Switzerland has landed on is also more measured than a blanket reversal. BAKOM's parallel process for post-2026 private FM licences preserves the market logic: SRG's spectrum is reserved outright, but private broadcasters must compete for 20 regional frequency packages through a tender closing July 31, 2026, with licences running through December 31, 2034 — a full technology-neutral runway rather than another rigid five-year cliff-edge (BAKOM). That is the more defensible model: let FM and DAB+ coexist until usage data, not a legislature's original guess, shows the digital transition is actually complete.
What This Costs, and Who Pays
The reversal isn't free. SRG's initial 21-site FM reactivation, covering roughly 85% of the population, runs about CHF 6.6 million annually; a further expansion phase toward 90% coverage and 156 transmission sites would push the annual bill toward CHF 15 million (Radio World) — a bill largely funded by the same licence-fee payers whose listening habits triggered the U-turn. That's a real cost of getting the original sequencing wrong, and Swiss lawmakers should treat it as a lesson for the next mandated technology transition, not just a one-off fix for radio.