PTT (Switzerland)

The Swiss PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph Enterprises) (German: Schweizerische Post-, Telephon- und Telegraphen-Betriebe, French: Postes, télégraphes et téléphones, Italian: Poste, telegrafi e telefoni) was the postal, telegraph, and telephone agency of Switzerland, from 1928 to 1998. The PTT were the state authority for mail, telephone, telegraph and fax services in Switzerland and Liechtenstein between 1852 and January 1, 1998. The predecessor of the PTT was the Swiss Post, which was already founded in 1847 during the Sonderbund War. With the entry into force of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1848, the post was placed under state supervision and transformed into the Federal Post. In the mid-1880s, the Federal Post turned to building a telephone network using Alexander Graham Bell's system. In the 1920s, efforts were made to unite the then Post and Telegraph Directorates. These succeeded in 1928 with the founding of the PTT.

During the Second as well as the First World War, the PTT or the Swiss Post were intensively occupied with delivering internee mail. In the course of the European liberalization of telecommunications, the PTT were dissolved on January 1, 1998, and their tasks transferred to Swiss Post and Swisscom. While Swiss Post remained a government agency with a partial service monopoly (it was converted into a statutory Aktiengesellschaft in 2013), Swisscom became a competitor on a liberalised telecommunications market and is an Aktiengesellschaft of which the Confederation holds a majority of shares.