No, it is a your brother, watching over you. It is the bully from down the street who peeps through your window, eats “Chäsefondue” and plays the alphorn. In Germany, finally we got used to a kind of public wifi which requires nothing more than clicking away a fig-leaf legal disclaimer … Unless you travel on the ECE from Basel to Hamburg. which is about 5km on swiss territory and then more than 650km on german grounds. You can live in Germany, on the DB (German Railway) website you book a ride from e.g. Freiburg (Germany) to Hamburg (still Germany), you don’t cross neither Switzerland nor France. But Swiss Brother is watching you as soon as you want internet on the train.
But you have to f**king register personally (phone number or the official swiss ID based registration) with the SBB for wifi access and obey swiss law which holds you liable for your phone number for 12 month (e.g. when you change your contract without number transfer and your old number gets reassigned). Although I first thought it was tied to the “VÜPF Novelle” of 2025/26 it seems, that provider like SBB did already require such registration in the of regularory framework.
Nevertheless, it bugs me that the DB doesn’t hint that the ECE trains are (at least partially) subject to foreign laws and the SBB wifi portal simply transfers swiss law to non-swiss customers (or simply ignores, that non-swiss customers may not understand the implications of the registration).
As the uncertainty remains if an ECE is swiss or german territory, I’ll avoid them in future. P.S.: There are also no quiet zones in the 2nd class. 🙄
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