Switzerland’s leading telecoms firm has sparked a war of words by announcing its first concrete move onto the lucrative market for digital television services

Switzerland’s leading telecoms firm has sparked a war of words by announcing its first concrete move onto the lucrative market for digital television services. Swisscom said on Wednesday that it would launch a new digital recording service, Bluewin TV 300, as a first step towards the introduction of a full-scale TV-over-Internet offer later this year.The former state-run monopoly – still majority-owned by the federal government – is one of several European telecoms firms investing in TV services as well as voice calls and broadband Internet access. But archrival Cablecom – the main provider of cable TV services in Switzerland – has hit back at Swisscom, saying it has been providing similar services for more than a year. And it adds that Swisscom is effectively "hitching a ride" on its existing broadband cable infrastructure. The latest row parallels the ongoing political dispute over whether rival telecoms operators should be granted direct access to individual households via Swisscom’s existing telecoms infrastructure – the so-called "last mile". Analysts say it also masks a more fundamental question: whether Swisscom is really ready to launch its much-vaunted TV-over-Internet service.