On 21 April 2026, Switzerland's Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM/BAKOM) opened the procedure to re-award VHF (FM) broadcasting licences for the period 2027 to 2034. On 28 May 2026 it published the frequency packages, with applications due by 31 July 2026 and auctions to follow in autumn 2026 wherever several broadcasters compete for the same cluster. It is an unremarkable administrative timetable that marks a remarkable U-turn: the country that had positioned itself as Europe's model for an orderly analogue switch-off has just decided to keep FM alive for the better part of another decade.
A deadline that outran the market
Switzerland resolved to phase out FM as far back as 2017, and on 25 October 2023 the Federal Council fixed the end of 2026 as the final switch-off date (per OFCOM's FM page). Public broadcaster SRG SSR went first, ceasing all FM transmission on 31 December 2024 and moving its 17 radio services to DAB+ and the internet. The plan was tidy on paper. The market disagreed.
In the first half of 2025, SRG SSR lost roughly 500,000 listeners after leaving FM, while private stations that stayed on the analogue band gained around 300,000, according to heise online. About one-third of Swiss vehicles still lack a DAB+ receiver, leaving a large captive audience for whom "digital radio" simply means a silent dashboard. Faced with that evidence, the Council of States voted 21 to 18, with five abstentions, in December 2025 to abandon the hard 2026 shutdown and push any deactivation to at least the end of 2031 (per WorldDAB). OFCOM then drew up the 2027–2034 licensing terms now in motion.
Steelman the original plan
The case for a fixed switch-off was not frivolous. Running FM and DAB+ in parallel forces broadcasters to pay for two transmission networks at once — an expensive duplication that drags on for years if no one sets an end point. A firm sunset gives the whole industry a coordination signal, frees VHF spectrum for other uses, and prevents a collective-action trap in which every station waits for someone else to switch off first. SRG SSR itself argued it would only have made sense to abandon FM if the entire sector did so together. Sweden, Norway and others have used national timetables precisely to break that deadlock. A deadline is, in theory, the cleanest way to retire a legacy technology.
Why the reversal is the better policy
The trouble is that a regulator-imposed death date substitutes an administrative guess for actual consumer behaviour — and when the guess is wrong, the cost lands on listeners, not on the spreadsheet that produced it. Switzerland's half-million vanished listeners are the price of mandating a migration faster than the installed base of radios could follow. The pro-innovation position here is not nostalgia for analogue; it is technology neutrality. DAB+ and streaming should win listeners because they are better, not because the state criminalised the alternative on a calendar date. As Councillor Isabelle Chassot put it during the debate, "Extending FM temporarily does not prevent the gradual migration to DAB+." The two can coexist while demand, rather than decree, retires the older standard.
What makes OFCOM's new process genuinely interesting is its mechanism. This is not an open-ended reprieve. SRG SSR and the 25 licensed stations with a public-service mandate may keep their existing frequencies on application, but the remaining FM clusters are put out as competitive packages, with auctions in autumn 2026 where interest exceeds supply (per OFCOM's allocation notice). Frequencies left unclaimed by the end of 2026 can be tendered again in 2027. That is a market-discovery device: it lets willing broadcasters reveal, through bids, how much FM access is actually worth to them, and it allocates a finite public resource by demonstrated demand rather than by grandfathered entitlement. If FM truly has a residual decade of value, an auction will surface it; if it does not, clusters will go unclaimed and the band will quietly empty itself — exactly the demand-led wind-down the 2023 deadline tried to force.
The lesson for telecom regulators
Switzerland's reversal is a small story with a large moral for spectrum and infrastructure policy everywhere. Regulators are repeatedly tempted to legislate the end of a technology — copper telephone lines, 3G networks, analogue broadcasting — on fixed national timetables. Sometimes coordination genuinely requires it. But the Swiss episode is a reminder that a sunset clause is a forecast dressed as a rule, and forecasts about consumer hardware turnover are easy to get wrong. The proportionate instrument is the one OFCOM has now reached for: keep the legacy service available, price access to it through application and auction, and let the freed spectrum and the retreating audience tell you when the technology is genuinely dead. A deadline announces an answer; a market mechanism asks the question. On the evidence of 2025, the question was the wiser approach all along.