IoT Stockholm - the central IoT platform for a city of a million people

Background

Stockholm’s Vision 2040 is to be the world’s smartest and most connected city, and the strategy for getting there was adopted by the City Council on 3 April 2017. A strategy at that scale runs into an unavoidable problem: a city of a million people is not one organisation. Dozens of administrations and city-owned companies each buy their own systems, and data that would be valuable across boundaries stays inside the department that collected it.

The city’s answer was to make the data layer common: "central IoT capabilities to collect the city’s connected data in one place", offered to every administration and city-owned company as a shared service with the cost distributed between them.

One platform, many organisations

In 2020 the city published a target architecture for IoT and data platforms that divided the whole into three layers (Edge, Platform and business operations) and, more importantly, gave each layer an owner. Administrations and city-owned companies are responsible for the edge and for their own operations; Stadsledningskontoret is responsible for the platform and the central capabilities; and the city-owned Stokab is responsible for fibre and data communication.

That division of responsibility is what makes a shared platform workable in a large public organisation. Each administration still chooses and buys its own sensors and still owns its own processes. What it no longer has to do is procure and operate a platform to put them on. The city has also complemented its fibre network with a city-internal LoRaWAN network, available as an orderable service.

Yggio as the city’s common platform

Yggio has been the city’s licensed central IoT platform since 2022. The city is open about how it got there: the original plan was to procure technology and IoT competence together through a competitive dialogue, run with three suppliers selected from 33 companies. That procurement was cancelled, and the city instead licensed the technical platform on its own.

What a common operational layer has to do is the same in a city as anywhere else: collect from any device over any network, normalise the data, and expose it through one standardised API to whatever business system, analysis or open-data service needs it, while the city keeps control of its own data rather than handing it to a platform owner.

The city measures its own progress and publishes the numbers. A survey of IoT initiatives found 12 in 2022; repeating it in 2025 found 35, and eleven of those had become established solutions in day-to-day operation. For what the city is doing with them, and where it is heading next, the City of Stockholm’s own pages are the best source, and they are linked below.

Beyond the platform: RESCUE

Sensative works with the City of Stockholm beyond the platform itself. Both the city and Region Västra Götaland are partners with Sensative in the EU project RESCUE, which develops resilient edge computing, AI and secure communication for critical infrastructure and urban environments. Sweden’s two largest public IoT collaborations are working on the same question at the same time.