Stokab: Stockholm's Municipal Open-Access Dark Fibre Network
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.
📖 Terms in this entry: LoRaWAN
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📎 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.