EPIC GuideUtilities
You will need standard utilities in Lausanne just as anywhere else: a phone and an Internet connection.
Historically, Switzerland’s main provider for phone and Internet is Swisscom, which used to be a state-owned company and still has special status. However, it is quite expensive. Their subsidiary Wingo focuses on plans for young people and on fiber-based home Internet.
At EPFL there is a Salt shop, which has special “limited time” offers essentially all the time.
Phone
You have generally two options for phone plans: prepaid or postpaid, with the latter being the kind that sends you a bill each month. When switching plans, even across providers, you can always keep your phone number.
If you need a Swiss phone number as soon as possible, buy a prepaid SIM, which you can even buy at Geneva Airport with Lebara. Note that in Switzerland, shops are required by law to identify SIM card buyers, meaning you will need to show an ID such as a passport.
The most convenient form of prepaid is Coop Mobile, because their credits do not expire: you buy phone/SMS/data credits once, and can keep using them until you need more, regardless of how long it’s been since you bought the credits.
There are many postpaid plans, some of which have frequent sales. One nice one for PhD students and anyone else with EPFL credentials is digitec connect, which is only 12 CHF/month in that case.
Internet
There are many Internet service providers in Switzerland, most of which are “virtual” providers that use another provider’s network. Speeds go from 10 Mb/s to 10 Gb/s depending on what you are willing to pay for and what infrastructure physically exists in your building. Pretty much all Internet plans these days have unlimited data without speed restrictions, though there is typically an exemption for amounts of data that go well beyond personal consumption.
You may get an Internet subscription included in your rent depending on where you live, in which case the remainder of this section is not useful to you.
If you want TV anyway, you may be interested in Citycable, which does combined TV+Internet subscriptions.
One very cheap Internet provider is InterXS, though in exchange they have no physical offices and little in the way of customer support.