EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignNetwork & Firewall ManagementHeadquarters: SE

Arelion: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Arelion is an international carrier that operates a global IP backbone network and sells IP transit, wavelengths, Ethernet, cloud connectivity and DDoS mitigation to network operators, content providers and enterprises. The service is a telecommunications connection over fibre infrastructure, not software. The company was previously known as Telia Carrier, the international carrier arm of the Telia group, and was renamed Arelion in January 2022, after its 2021 sale to the infrastructure investor Polhem Infra.

Arelion is headquartered in Solna, near Stockholm, Sweden. Its owner is Polhem Infra, a Swedish infrastructure investor backed by Swedish pension funds, so no foreign parent company is involved. For a carrier, the sovereignty question for a European organisation concerns routing more than hosting. The backbone connects North America, Europe and Asia, so traffic can transit outside the EU even when both endpoints are in Europe.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 11, 2026
Headquarters
SE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Network & Firewall Management
Type
Product
Website
arelion.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Arelion

The European alternatives to Arelion come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

41 European Network & Firewall Management vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Arelion

Arelion is headquartered in SE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Arelion scores best on data residency.

Arelion is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Arelion together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Arelion?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Arelion include Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Allegro Packets and BIRD Internet Routing Daemon. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Arelion?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Arelion include BIRD Internet Routing Daemon and Deciso OPNsense. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Arelion GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Arelion is headquartered in SE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Arelion an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 11, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 11, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in Network & Firewall Management

Network & Firewall Management: Central management of firewalls, switches and Wi-Fi, network access control (NAC), load balancing and DNS/DHCP/IPAM. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Arelion — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score