A few months ago, I was in the Zürich main station with my laptop, WLAN card (but no Swisscom Mobile card) and needed to check the train schedule. No problem, Swisscom provided free access to sbb.ch. Very nice, very useful: I was able to get my connection info.
Recently, I had a similar problem, fired up my laptop (Swisscom card was unavailable due to a hardware problem). After filling in "St. Gallen" to "Zürich" on the sbb home page, I got this nice little screen:
They want me to log in (pay for access).
You'll notice, all the way to the right, it says "Free Contents: Services found in the www.sbb.ch website can be accessed... free of charge.". Very friendly of them.
Sort of.
It seems the train schedules are actually loaded from fahrplan.sbb.ch, but that Swisscom Mobile really means www.sbb.ch, not anything else, not even fahrplan.sbb.ch.
Looking at the SBB home page, most of the links go to places like travel.sbb.ch, mct.sbb.ch, or even sbbcargo.ch... Not much comes from www.sbb.ch. So all you can really look at is the home page.
Don't know who changed what, but it like the SBB and Swisscom didn't cross check their site architecture with their marketing agreements.
Ah, the left hand and the right hand. It's amazing how difficult it is to keep them informed about what the other is doing...
