Stokab: Stockholm's Municipal Open-Access Dark Fibre Network
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Stockholm has owned the fibre under its streets since 1994 and has never sold anyone an internet connection. It leases the unlit strands to 100+ operators on equal, non-discriminatory terms.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 8 more in Stockholm · 📶 Connectivity & 5G guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
Stokab, wholly owned by the City of Stockholm, has leased dark (unlit) fibre on equal, non-discriminatory terms to any operator, business or institution since 1994 — it never sells retail internet itself. Its network now reaches over 90% of regional households and 99% of commercial buildings, with 100+ operators leasing capacity on it.
📊 Impact
A 2012 study commissioned by Stokab and carried out by the research institute Acreo Swedish ICT estimated the network's socio-economic return at roughly SEK 16 billion — nearly three times the SEK 5.4 billion Stokab had invested by then — from measurable effects like avoided duplicate digging and lower connection costs alone.
🎓 Lesson
A city doesn't have to become an internet service provider to fix a broadband market — Stokab shows municipal ownership can instead mean building the shared physical layer once and leasing it to a competitive market of operators on equal terms.
Sources
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Compare this project
Who owns the fibre?
Four cities that decided broadband was infrastructure rather than a service someone else provides — and took four different positions on how far a municipality should go.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | How far the city went |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stokab: Stockholm's Municipal Open-Access Dark Fibre NetworkStockholm, 🇸🇪 | 1994 | Live | Succeeded | Official | City government | not public | The city owns dark fibre and leases it to anyone on equal terms, and has never sold internet itself — the shared physical layer, built once. |
| EPB Gig City — Fiber-Optic Smart Grid & Community BroadbandChattanooga, 🇺🇸 | 2008 | Live | Succeeded | Independent | Utility or public operator | not public | The municipal utility built the fibre for its own grid automation and became the retail internet provider on top of it. |
| Medellín Digital: Free Public WiFi & Digital InclusionMedellín, 🇨🇴 | 2007 | Live | Ongoing | Official | City government | not public | No fibre of its own: the city buys access, running free public wifi points and telecentres across every comuna. |
| Smart DocklandsDublin, 🇮🇪 | 2017 | Live | Ongoing | Independent | City government, Research institution | not public | Neither owner nor provider — the city brokered a neutral-host testbed so operators could share one set of masts. |
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Stokab: Stockholm's Municipal Open-Access Dark Fibre Network” — Stockholm, Sweden. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/stockholm-stokab-fiber/ (last verified 2026-07-28). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.