Summary

  • Netnod's Internet Exchange pricing page carries an effective date, a two-part charge (port access plus the service delivered over that port), SEK monthly prices excluding VAT, and no membership fee — but not one sentence about how the numbers are set or changed.
  • The same organisation states on its own about page that it is fully owned by the non-profit foundation TU-stiftelsen, which makes the buyer a customer rather than a member, and leaves the price-setting hand outside everything the buyer can read.

A tariff you can recompute, and cannot trace

Start with what the page does well, because the omission only means something against the strengths. The price page states "Effective 5 September 2025." It prices in SEK, monthly unless otherwise stated, VAT and other governmental charges excluded. It tells you the total monthly charge is not one thing but two: a port-access fee plus the fee for services delivered over that port. It states that there is no annual charge, no membership fee and no separately priced one-off setup fee, and spells out the on-net case in the publisher's own words: "There is no set up fee for on-net connections."

It also tells you what it will not do for you. Off-net in Stockholm, Netnod arranges fibre access and provides a quote on request. Off-net anywhere else, the customer orders the fibre. Redundant ports require two cross connects. Those are the sentences of a document written by people who know where the cost sits.

The port schedule is three lines wide:

A tariff you can recompute, and cannot trace
Port Single, SEK/month Redundant, SEK/month
10G 1,000 2,000
100G 2,500 5,000
400G 5,000 10,000

Peering service for Netnod IXes in Sweden and Denmark is priced separately and — the page is explicit — excludes port access and covers one IX. Single, per month, in SEK: 600 at 1Gbps, 3,800 at 5Gbps, 6,500 at 10Gbps, 20,000 at 50Gbps, 31,250 at 100Gbps, 70,000 at 400Gbps. Redundant: 1,000, 7,000, 12,700, 39,100, 55,000, 130,000. Helsinki and Oslo get their own, cheaper table: 500, 3,000, 4,100, 12,500, 17,500, 40,000 single, and 900, 5,800, 7,900, 19,000, 34,000, 78,000 redundant, also excluding port access.

Remote IX runs 500/1,500/2,500/6,250/7,500 between any IX except Helsinki and any IX except Helsinki, and exactly double that to or from Helsinki: 1,000/3,000/5,000/12,500/15,000. Cross IX is "from 2,000 SEK." Closed User Group is 1,000 for a VLAN on an existing port, 600 for a dedicated 1Gbps port, 6,500 for a dedicated 10Gbps port, and a dedicated connection also carries the relevant port-access fee. Private VLAN Metro is 2,000 at 10Gbps and 2,500 at 100Gbps; Regional is 3,000 and 10,000, and it needs a Netnod One Port connection at both ends.

The arithmetic a buyer can redo in a minute

Divide the port charge by the port speed and the shape of the schedule appears. Per gigabit per month: 100 at 10G, 25 at 100G, 12.5 at 400G. Multiply back and you land on the printed figure every time — 12.5 × 400 = 5,000, 25 × 100 = 2,500, 100 × 10 = 1,000. The largest port's unit rate is exactly one eighth of the smallest's. A 400G port costs five times what a 10G port costs and delivers forty times the speed.

That is my arithmetic on Netnod's printed numbers, not a published discount statement. But it is the arithmetic any buyer's spreadsheet will produce, and it carries a consequence the page does not state: at the top of the range you are buying roughly four-fifths of the port's cost back in unit-rate terms, and at the bottom you are paying for the privilege of a small pipe.

Then do the same to the peering table, and the curve stops behaving. Per gigabit per month, single: 600 at 1Gbps, 760 at 5Gbps, 650 at 10Gbps, 400 at 50Gbps, 312.5 at 100Gbps, 175 at 400Gbps. A gigabit of peering is more expensive at 5Gbps than at 1Gbps. It is more expensive at 5Gbps than at 10Gbps. The cheapest unit rate on the table belongs to the largest line, and the second cheapest belongs to the smallest — 1Gbps at 600 against 5Gbps at 760. The same non-monotonic shape recurs in the redundant column and, at different levels, in the Helsinki and Oslo table, where the per-gigabit figures run 500, 600, 410, 250, 175, 100.

Where the doubling stops

Here is the sharpest thing on the page, and it is a shape rather than a number.

Port redundancy doubles. Exactly. 2,000 over 1,000, 5,000 over 2,500, 10,000 over 5,000 — a clean factor of two at every published speed.

Peering redundancy does not. 1,000 over 600 is 1.67. 7,000 over 3,800 is 1.84. 12,700 over 6,500 is 1.95. 39,100 over 20,000 is 1.955. 55,000 over 31,250 is 1.76. 130,000 over 70,000 is 1.857. Six lines, six different multipliers, and not one of them lands on two. In the Helsinki and Oslo table the same column runs 1.8, 1.93, 1.93, 1.52, 1.94, 1.95 — a different scatter again, with the 50Gbps line at 1.52 the cheapest redundancy anywhere on the page.

So port redundancy is a rule and peering redundancy is a negotiation with itself. If you want the cleanest doubling in the entire document, it is not redundancy at all. It is the geographic surcharge: Helsinki remote IX costs exactly twice the non-Helsinki remote IX at every one of five speeds, 1,000/500, 3,000/1,500, 5,000/2,500, 12,500/6,250, 15,000/7,500. A distant city is a formula. A second port of the same speed is a number somebody arrived at.

Put the two elements together and the unit economics compress hard. One 10G single port plus 10Gbps single peering in Sweden is 7,500 a month, or 750 per gigabit. One 400G single port plus 400Gbps single peering is 75,000, or 187.5 per gigabit. Same product logic, same page, same date, and a fourfold difference that has almost nothing to do with the port — the port is 1,000 of the 7,500 and 5,000 of the 75,000. The gap lives in the service line, and the service line is where the schedule is least mechanical.

One more thing a careful reader will notice and a careless one will not. The figure 6,500 appears twice on this page for two different products: the 10Gbps peering service in Sweden and Denmark, and a dedicated 10Gbps Closed User Group port. Neither is a price for the other. Two lines can carry the same number without carrying the same meaning, and a schedule that publishes both is inviting exactly that confusion.

A seller owned by a foundation that charges no membership fee

None of this is illegible. That is the point. The page is legible to the last decimal, and the thing that would let a customer reason about it — who decides, by what procedure, with what notice — is absent.

What sits behind the seller is stated plainly, in one sentence, on Netnod's about page: "Netnod is a neutral and independent Internet infrastructure organisation based in Sweden. Netnod is fully owned by the non-profit foundation TU-stiftelsen (Stiftelsen för Telematikens utveckling)." The same page prints a registration number, 556534-0014, without saying which entity in that chain it belongs to, and it does not state the legal form of the operating entity itself.

Read the ownership sentence beside the price list and the commercial shape becomes clear. The port customer is not a member. There is no membership fee to pay, because there is no membership to hold. The customer buys a port, buys peering over it, and holds a contract and an invoice. The residual interest in the exchange — whatever surplus the year produces after the fibre, the cross connects, the salaries and the root-server anycasting — belongs to a foundation, and the customer has no route into it and no claim on it. That is a coherent design for neutrality.

It is also a design in which the only thing the buyer can influence is whether to buy.

I looked for the instrument that would close the gap and did not get it. The authority whose start page carries the navigation headings "Stiftelser, testamenten och gåvor," "Stiftelsens föreskrifter" and "Styrelsens eller förvaltarens beslut att ansöka om permutation" — foundations, wills and gifts; the foundation's own regulations; the board's or administrator's decision to apply for permission — is the body that would know how a foundation's stated purpose constrains its board. Its start page says nothing about supervision scope, legal basis, membership or the disposal of surplus. A Swedish statute page I attempted on 13 November 2026 resolved to a different act entirely. So the foundation's charter, its purpose clause, its board appointment route, its amendment procedure and the statutory text all sit outside this article, unread.

What the schedule does not say

What I can state is what the four pages state, on 13 November 2026, and what they do not.

The Internet Exchange page, titled "Internet Exchange | Netnod", names no port speeds on its face. It carries the visible link text "View Pricing" to the page analysed above, and a "Get in touch" link to a contact page with an enquiry form that is not labelled an order form. It states no membership terms, no contract terms, no service level, no notice period — none of the sentences a buyer's lawyer would look for first. That page is a shop window, and shop windows are allowed to be that.

The price page is where the substance is, and its silence has a specific shape. It is stamped with an effective date and not with a revision date. It prices the standard product and leaves two products unpriced by name: the Unlimited product, described as unlimited traffic at any Netnod IX in Sweden, Copenhagen, Helsinki or Oslo, and Netnod Time Direct. Both route the reader to a conversation. Cross IX is a floor, "from 2,000 SEK," which is a different speech act from a price.

So the honest reading of this document is not that Netnod hides its prices. It publishes them further than most of its peers would, in a cleaner unit, with a two-part structure that tells a buyer the port is not the product. What it does not publish is the governance: no sentence on who approves a tariff, no revision history, no stated notice of change, no membership body that votes on anything. The number is the least interesting thing on the page. The signature is missing from it.