Salt and Sunrise Test Rural Network Sharing

Data Center Dynamics reports that Salt and Sunrise this week signed a memorandum of understanding to study sharing radio access network infrastructure in rural and less densely populated parts of Switzerland, a pact aimed at boosting mobile connectivity coverage by turning duplicated rural sites into a shared cost. The MoU feeds into plans to assess a broader multioperator core network sharing (MOCN) model, under which selected antenna sites would connect to both carriers' core networks and customers of either operator could use parts of the other's network at those sites.

Rural sites carry fewer users than urban ones, and Sunrise CEO André Krause concedes that network expansion and operation "can't be delivered as efficiently where there are fewer users per site." The companies frame the goal as "more efficient use of existing network infrastructure and more targeted investment in future network development, with greater financial efficiency than on a stand-alone basis," which is the case for sharing: when revenue per site is thin, the only variable left to move is cost per site, and two carriers splitting one antenna grid changes that arithmetic for every shared site. Because Salt and Sunrise already cooperate at selected mobile sites, the agreement extends an existing partnership rather than inventing one, and Salt CEO Max Nunziata sees it as a chance to strengthen rural connectivity and future-proof infrastructure for rising demand while the two continue to compete independently.

MOCN keeps the two core networks separate while sharing active radio access, which makes it a different animal from a tower sale or passive site arrangement. Salt and Sunrise say they will keep their own core networks, licences, spectrum control, and commercial decision-making, but the study will still have to reconcile two independent spectrum strategies through a single antenna grid, with planning, operational, economic, legal, and regulatory requirements all listed in the MoU, and any definitive agreement depends on the outcome of that phase.

Infrastructure without an anchor tenant has to compete for capital on its own, and rural coverage is about as far from an anchor tenant as digital infrastructure gets. Network sharing is one of the few tools that changes that, converting a duplicated fixed cost into a shared one and pushing rural returns toward the coverage customers expect. The trade is real, though: a shared RAN narrows the technical differentiation the two carriers can offer at the sites they share, and that sameness is a cost that does not appear on the MoU's planning checklist. The study phase should be judged on whether the savings are large enough to make the sameness a good bargain; for rural Switzerland, that bargain is the right trade to test.