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Your personal offer from UPC

Published by marco on

I’m in the market for a mobile plan, so my wife forwarded me a link to this page at UPC:

 Dein Persönliches Angebot

I’ve taken the liberty of adding some notes to the screenshot, but I’ll also list them here:

  • They write that this offer is for me, personally, but there is no identifying information in the URL or cookies. This page looks the same in a private window. Stop lying to me, UPC. This offer is for literally anyone who stumbles across this page.[1]
  • I was kind of shocked to see that WhatsApp is given preferential treatment by having its data excluded from the data cap. This means that people with a data cap have a strong incentive to use WhatsApp. How much did WhatsApp/Facebook/Meta pay for that, I wonder? My (infinitely patient) wife (waited for me to stop swearing and) informed me that this is the standard in Switzerland.[2]
  • At any rate, what is the point of telling me about WhatsApp being “included” in one of the four main points of the plan when the plan is explicitly for unlimited bandwidth? Thanks, UPC, ∞ − WhatsApp Bandwidth still equals ∞.


[1] There is an asterisk that notes that the offer is only open to existing UPC customers and limited to one mobile plan per household.
[2] It’s an interesting conundrum: you could argue that the Swiss mobile providers are doing people a favor by excluding their preferred messaging service from data caps. On the other hand, how is any other service supposed to gain a foothold when it’s being discriminated against by tariffing its traffic when its monopolist competitor avoids all tariffs? Or maybe we should just get rid of bandwidth limits entirely?[3] Or have a state-sponsored messaging service as if it were actually the utility that it has become?
[3] While we’re at it, can we also eliminate roaming fees for Swiss users in Europe? It’s utterly criminal that they still exist. In some places in Switzerland, if you get within 15km of the border, your phone connects to a European tower instead and you either (A) have to pay for roaming or (B) turn off roaming and do without a data plan (neat if your hiking map is online) or (C) dig into the arcane cellular settings to figure out how to get it to connect to a Swiss provider instead. None of these options are fun when the only reason this exists is to shovel money towards already-fattened mobile-phone monopsonies.