The internet in Sweden is still broken, nine years later

30 October 2026

A little over nine years ago I wrote a text called The internet in Sweden is broken (pdf, also available in English). At the time Sweden was at around 4 percent IPv6 according to Google's measurements, and almost all of it came from a single mobile network. Nobody delivered IPv6 to anyone's home.

In early October 2026 I gave the talk IPv6 in Sweden, how is it going? (36 minutes). So how is it going? Better, but the internet in Sweden is still broken. It is just broken in partly new places.

From 4 to 37 percent

• Sweden is currently at 37 percent IPv6 towards Google. That is 45th place in the world, behind "well-known IT nations such as" Bhutan, the Dominican Republic, Qatar, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Nicaragua, among others.
• The world as a whole has been at around 50 percent for 17 weekends in a row. France is at 86.7 percent and India at 67.9. Google IPv6 statistics
• What has happened in Sweden is driven by a handful of players. In 2024 Telia rolled out IPv6 to roughly one million residential fibre ports, Telenor has IPv6 in its 5G network, and when Telavox started with IPv6 we went from about 35 to 37 percent. The COs have become better at IPv6, but progress is still very slow.

So the sentence "nobody delivers IPv6 to anyone's home" is no longer entirely true, but unfortunately there are still problems.

The next big thing for IPv6 in Sweden is Telia's mobile network. They have had it running for VoLTE for many years, and if they turn it on for browsing I think Sweden will easily pass 70 percent in Google's statistics.

More about the figures can be found in How much is IPv6 used?.

What is standing still

The communication operators

Eight years ago the communication operators (CO) were already the big problem, and they still are. I have mapped 116 COs and 138 ISPs that deliver service in their networks.

• Most CO networks are built on layer 3, which means every ISP has to hand over/route its IPv6 prefixes to every CO. If 50 ISPs are to enable IPv6 at 50 COs, that makes 2,500 projects, and at ten emails per project that is 25,000 emails.
• On layer 2 the ISP sees the customer's router/MAC addresses directly, which makes enabling IPv6 much easier since it can be done without involving the CO. One municipal network I have talked to plans to build it that way when they move to the CO model.
• The fibre owner and the CO account for roughly 90 percent of the cost. Capacity is cheap, and the difference between ISPs is often just a few kronor a month. The idea that it gets cheaper when customers can choose between many ISPs is a persistent myth. It just means more players who will/should/must make money.
• In public housing, the most expensive CO can win the procurement because it can give the most back to the housing company.

PTS should have required IPv6 from the COs from the start, when the money for subsidised fibre was being distributed.

Home routers

Even when the ISP offers IPv6, it is rarely turned on in the router at home. Only around 10 percent of the routers sold in shops have IPv6 enabled out of the box, and those are mainly D-Link. If you have, for example, an Asus or TP-Link or another brand, you have to log in and turn it on yourself. Enthusiasts do that, but how many others do? Feel free to read this, which confirms the industry's ignorance and myths.
How to do it is described in IPv6 at home.

The public sector

• In 2010 the government set a digital agenda saying that the public sector should have IPv6 by 2013 at the latest. Today 28 percent of municipalities have IPv6 on web, DNS and email. In the Netherlands it is 82 percent. Their counterpart to PTS can impose requirements, whereas PTS can only make recommendations.\

  • I came up with the measurement method of IPv6 on web, DNS and email off the top of my head at a meeting with PTS around 20 years ago. PTS asked when the public sector would manage to enable it, and I threw out something like "Well, they should have managed it in three years" 🫩

• A year ago I went through 200 municipal IT procurements. Two of them required IPv6, which is 1 percent. In more than half of them the requirement would have been relevant.

• If a municipality, company or organisation wants to know what the central organisations think about IPv6, it goes to /dev/null. SKR, Stadsnätsföreningen, Bredbandsforum and various industry organisations say more or less nothing about it.

.se domains

In a sample of 10,000 .se domains, 33 percent of the websites have IPv6, and almost 87 percent of the DNS servers. For email it is 28.6 percent, but since 40 percent of the domains have no email at all, 58 percent have IPv6. It is the big web hosts/registrars and Microsoft 365 (or whatever it is called today/tomorrow 🫩) that drive these figures. If one.com adds AAAA to its MX, that 58% will go up a lot.

New obstacles

• BankID and Freja do not work with IPv6 only. If you run IPv6 at home without translation to IPv4, you cannot log in to your bank.
  Freja fixed things so it worked over IPv6 only later the same day, but I have failed to find a service with Freja login that supports IPv6.
  Does anyone know of a login that uses Freja and has IPv6 support?
• Cloud services. Microsoft 365 is the biggest in the .se domain for IPv6 on incoming email, but otherwise a lot is missing. Google's services have full support.
• OT and IoT. Equipment that controls things like heating, water and electricity often lacks IPv6 support.
  And for it to work, "the automation has to be automatic", with dynamic addresses and, for example, DNS that updates itself. No technician will, or should, type in IPv6 addresses by hand.
  Read more in IPv6 in OT and SCADA networks.
• Vendors who do not care. Take Fortinet as an example: they have supported IPv6 for many, many years, but there are no good guides and nobody there who talks about or advocates IPv6. It is the same with all vendors: "Yes, we support IPv6, but...." 🤬
• "We have always done it this way." Old address plans and other habits are ingrained in many people and unfortunately rub off on the younger generation.

The myths live on

• NAT is security. Both Coop and Miljödata were running NAT when they were hit by their well-known attacks. NAT has never provided better security and never will. A network is as secure as you design and set it up to be.
• With IPv6 everything is encrypted. IPsec used to be required in/alongside the IPv6 stack. That never meant traffic was encrypted automatically; it always had to be enabled manually. That requirement was removed 15(!!!) years ago.
• Experienced security experts on, for example, LinkedIn who say IPv6 is insecure are a big problem for IPv6 adoption.
  How then could Google/Facebook/Netflix etc. have had IPv6 running for over 10 years? 🫩

More myths can be found in IPv6 myths.

You are already running IPv6

• A network printer and other devices often talk IPv6 over link-local at home and in the office.
• Matter/Thread, used in smart homes, is built entirely on IPv6.
• An acquaintance with IPv6 at home measured that 88 percent of the traffic went over IPv6, mostly streaming. The only big exception was SVT Play.
• The guest network where I gave the talk ran IPv6 only using the IPv6-mostly concept. Everyone who used it ran CLAT with full IPv4 functionality without IPv4 on the network interface.
• Plus, IPv6 is usually faster. When I tested at two customers a few years ago, a large download was 15 to 20 percent faster over IPv6 than over IPv4.

How to get started

• Start with the guest network. Nobody is bothered there if something goes wrong. Cut the umbilical cord to IPv4 and go.
• Test IPv6 with the finance department. Nobody complains faster when printing from their super Excel sheet does not work. 🫩
• You do not need to buy anything. All the core equipment I know of has supported IPv6 for many years. What costs is working time, and that is not ten people full time for five years, but a one-day workshop and an hour or so per segment.
• Require IPv6 in procurements/systems. Many systems support it today without the vendors understanding/knowing it.
• Ask for more addresses. If you want a really neat address plan, you can ask RIPE for a larger block. Even though a /48 is extremely large, with segmentation and many security zones you should not have to squeeze things in with a shoehorn and Vaseline with IPv6.
  Two municipalities I have helped have two /48s, and one of them, for example, gave its redundant data centre its own /48.

More can be found in IPv6 for businesses.

Still broken

Going from 4 to 37 percent in eight years is decent but not good.
But the growth comes from three operators, while the COs, the routers, BankID and the regulations are standing still. IPv6 is not difficult. It is slightly longer numbers and more automation.
Do not be afraid, it is much easier than you think! 😀

The lists I referred to nine years ago are still around, now at kommunermedipv6.se: ISPs, IT companies, government agencies and municipalities. ipv6akutken.se and ipv6only.se are intended to end up here in a more modern version.