I have heard from some Swiss people that indeed it remains difficult even for EU citizens to settle down in Switzerland because the Swiss don't want foreigners here. Who have you been talking to ??? for ex an asset manager needs to be registered with the professional body in his/ her canton but to be registered you need to have a Swiss or Swiss resident on the board of your company ! You don't need to be registered as an 'asset manager'. The only thing you need to register is if you build up a company. You need about 15 minutes at the local 'registre du commerce' office to do that. The presence of a swiss resident on the board of the company is a very old law which will be changed in some time. But as Switzerland is a true democracy whose political system is based on compromise, you can't change laws like this, it takes time...a lot of time actually. Laws tend to change in 'packs'. Foreigners usually use swiss lawyers to sit on the board for them. As for estate agencies requiring salary slips what do self employed people do then ? I think given the grim state of the job market helping selff employed people and entrepreneurs to start business in Switzerland will not hurt . Unemployment rate is very low and a fair part of it is due to uneducated foreigners who can't find a job here anymore. For your problem of estate agency, what do you want me to tell you ? They are private companies and not social associations. If you can't convince them that you'll be able to pay your rent on a regular basis, they won't rent you anything. You need a guarantee. You may try to propose them to front pay 6 months of rent. The vacancy rate of appartments in the area is very low and they don't have any incentive to take risk. The best solution is to buy something.
I'm from EU and live in Switzerland (Geneva) for one year. It is a real dificulty to find an appartement (3 month on average), the only solution to get it quick is to know someone who have some power in the agencies. If you are willing to pay a little, take a "fiduciary" (I don't know the good translation) who have some relations, he will take care of your installation. Good luck.
what is better : ADSL or cable internet with the local cable company ? and for ADSL is it better in general to go with Swisscom (Bluewin)or another provider (Sunrise for ex.)? Some salesmen from one of those ADSL providers claim that cable tv experiences disruption of service , Sunrise people say BlueWin has only one server to connect all its customers , anyone has experience with different providers? Do you have to pay the TV tax if you watch TV on your PC ?
what is better : ADSL or cable internet with the local cable company ? Cable is usually better as it gives you a higher upload rate. and for ADSL is it better in general to go with Swisscom (Bluewin)or another provider (Sunrise for ex.)? As a rule of thumb, it's always better avoiding large providers as everyone use them, which means frequent problems and low level support. I personally use netstream (www.netstream.ch). Some salesmen from one of those ADSL providers claim that cable tv experiences disruption of service , Sunrise people say BlueWin has only one server to connect all its customers , anyone has experience with different providers? Salesmen... Do you have to pay the TV tax if you watch TV on your PC ? Yep. And it's quite high here, around 40CHF/month.
I have a problem ; I was going to get cable but the cable co is telling me my apartment building is not serviceable. So I am gonna have to get ADSL. It really bothers me first I just I read that Swisscom today had an interruption of service across Switzerland for several hours! Is this a common occurence? I just hope this happens once a year at worst. Then I am not sure which provider to use, apparently there is a hanful of them here, Sunrise, Tele2 being those you hear the most about. These 2 put me off with their pushy salespeople in the streets and I am still looking for their tech support phone number , but with Sunrise you can terminate the contract after 3 months , min 12 mo contract with the others
Hi, I´m swedish and live 5-6 month a year in Cannes,changed from France telecom adsl to tele 2 (swedish mothercompany) and came to hell, took me three month to get the line and 2000 euro i consultantscost and it works very bad with 10-15 interuptions every day. Go with the old monopolies, they work best
There's something you must know about ADSL. In Switzerland, last mile is still a monopoly of Swisscom. Today's outage (not permanent, but many outage during the day) is general, whatever your provider. Every provider has to go through Swisscom to reach you, and if the Swisscom link is down, everyone is down. A general failure like this one occurs less than once a year. But local failures occur more often. To see recent failures, have a look at : http://status.netstream.ch/netstream/juice Differences in providers come from their own link to the internet and the quality of their bandwidth.
what's the deal with these Netopia routers offered by SwissCom at Fr 98 and Fr 198 ? How good are Netopia products? they aren't even sold on Newegg.com or Ebuyer, I think they make mostly networking equipment for businesses , I 'd rather buy a Netgear or D-Link router which I am more familiar with and that could be used for both cable and adsl. http://fr.bluewin.ch/accesinternet/index.php/starterkit_adsl_starterkit
would you recommend using a back up UPS power supply ? There was a snow storm last weekend thousands of home were without electricity in France, I don't know about Switzerland. I never have power outages here - and 0 internet downtime- here except for last week when power went down for less than 10 sec. but I realized even that can have serious consequences .