What's New
BY Jen Seyderhelm June 1, 2026
What's New January 21, 2025
Switzerland switches off FM radio
Reporter
It happened quietly – a minute before midnight on New Year’s Eve – as partygoers across Switzerland prepared to ring in 2025.
At 11.59pm on Tuesday, December 31st 2024, the country’s public broadcasting association, otherwise known as SBC (the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation) officially pulled the plug on FM radio. And not everyone’s happy about it.
Whilst connections to hundreds of outdated, ultra-shortwave transmitters across the country were switched off, a handful of private radio stations in Switzerland plan to continue broadcasting on the FM band for the time being. That’s their choice.
But for many listeners, their favourite stations are now only accessible on DAB+ or via the internet.
In January 2021, the Swiss government announced it had reached an agreement with the radio industry on switching off analogue FM transmitters.
This followed a 2020 survey by GfK Switzerland, which showed that just 13% of the Swiss population still listened to FM radio.
Conversely, DAB+ use had increased by 22%.
In the years leading up to the switch-off, a petition, signed by more than 60,000 people, urged the Swiss government to rethink plans to phase out FM radio.
They argued that the decision flies in the face of federal laws which guarantee free access to radio.
Media experts also raised concerns that the SBC’s parent company wouldn’t be able to fulfill its mandate of providing a radio service to the population.
In 2017, Norway became the first country in the world to end national FM broadcasts, and if the latest indications are anything to go by, it won’t be the last.
As the use of DAB+ and internet radio continues to rise, official figures show that at the end of last year, just 10% of the Swiss population listened to radio via FM only.
And when did they listen to FM radio the most? When they were driving.
How embarrassing, that anyone would trust a survey of any kind run by people who have got it so wrong for so long.
And here in Australia we still have AM…..
The population of Switzerland is over 8M. The petition gathered 60k signatures or 0.75% of the population. I’d say they made the right decision.
Switzerland is a *completely* different media market to Australia. For example, their main public broadcaster discontinued terrestrial TV broadcasting in 2019 whereas the ABC is likely to keep their DVB-T services on air for at least a few more years. Terrestrial radio will probably last even longer in this country.
It’s difficult to imagine major FM services in Australia ending anytime in the foreseeable future (even if significant format and managerial changes are an inevitability over time), but I do wonder how many AM stations we’ll have in 5-10 years from now. While I wouldn’t realistically expect the ABC or big hitters like 2GB and 3AW to abandon Middle Wave, it’ll be rather interesting to see where the future is for some of Australia’s lower ranked AM stations.
Afterall, the thought that 2UE would play music while (what was once) 2CH would become a sports station probably would’ve had you laughed out of the room even a decade or slightly more ago! With that in mind, it’s not overly difficult for me to imagine that Sydney AM frequencies like 1269 and maybe even 954 may eventually shift to more niche formats, as per what has happened in the USA.