VPN server in Sweden: the Stockholm exit for the Nordics and the Baltic

Every latency figure on this page is a floor: the great-circle distance in kilometres divided by 100. The rule follows from the speed of light in glass fibre, about 200 km per millisecond, over a journey that has to go out and come back, so no route can achieve a shorter round trip.

Many of the links between these countries are submarine cables under the Baltic, and cables on land run beside railways and roads. Measured latency is therefore always higher than the floor, by an amount that depends on the route your provider uses.

Seen from Stockholm, the capitals across the water are closer than much of Sweden. Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle, is 950 km away, more than twice the distance to Tallinn.

Stockholm's advantage narrows to the south and west. Frankfurt, 1,200 km from Stockholm, and London, 1,450 km away, are the exits to compare from Poland, from the southern end of Scandinavia and from Iceland.

For North America, Stockholm is the longest of the three European routes compared here. Cedar Knolls, in the New York area, is 6,350 km from Stockholm, against 6,200 km from Frankfurt and 5,600 km from London, a difference of about 7 ms in the floor between Stockholm and London.

Stockholm serves two different purposes: a short route for the Nordic and Baltic countries, and an address in Sweden for anyone who needs one.

Many websites read a country from your IP address and adjust to it. Through Stockholm, that means Swedish-language pages, prices in kronor, and search results, maps and weather centred on Sweden. Some Swedish sites also publish an English version, reached through a language control on the page.

Swedish formatting tends to come with it. Sites that take their locale from the address write dates year first, in the form 2026-10-29, and use a comma as the decimal separator.

The effect reaches beyond Sweden. From Helsinki, Tallinn or Riga, where prices are in euros, and from Oslo, where they are in Norwegian kroner, many websites switch to Swedish pages and kronor while you are connected through Stockholm. A service that works out your time zone from the address rather than from your device will also show Swedish time, one hour behind Finland, Estonia and Latvia.

Large downloads tend to come from near the exit. A content delivery network sees the Stockholm exit's address when you request a file, and the DNS resolver that looked up the name was reached from that same address, so operating-system updates, software packages and video tend to arrive from a copy in Sweden or close to it.

Much travel around the Baltic goes by sea or rail. Ferries, many of them overnight, link Stockholm with Finland and with other ports around the Baltic, and rail lines connect Stockholm with Gothenburg, Malmö, Copenhagen and Oslo. Where ferries and trains offer Wi-Fi, it is a network shared with every other passenger.

A ship at sea has no fixed line to land. Its Wi-Fi reaches the shore by radio, over a satellite link or a mobile network within range of the coast, so its capacity is limited and divided among everyone on board. A phone on its own mobile data can move from one national network to another during a crossing, and coverage can disappear for stretches of open sea.

Complete the ship's or the train's sign-in page before connecting, then leave the tunnel on for the journey.

The page on train Wi-Fi, linked below, covers how onboard networks are carried, why they drop in cuttings and tunnels, and how WrapVPN's tunnel behaves through the gaps. On land, station, library and café networks need the same order: complete the sign-in page, then connect.

Three parties see part of a connection through Stockholm. The network you are on, whether a ship, a train or a café, sees an encrypted WireGuard session between your device and Stockholm, with its timing and the amount of data it carries, and none of the sites or lookups inside it.

The Stockholm exit server decrypts the tunnel and forwards your traffic, so it sees the addresses you connect to. HTTPS, which most sites and apps now use, keeps the content of a connection unreadable there, but traffic sent without encryption is readable at that point.

Websites and apps see the exit's IPv4 address, shared by every user of the Stockholm exit, rather than the address of the network you are on. Some sites meet an address that many people share with extra checks, such as a CAPTCHA.

Two of WrapVPN's records concern the exit directly, and a DNS filter runs on it; the privacy policy describes the others.