The Baltic Network Operators Group moves from Vilnius to Riga for its second edition. On paper it is a networking conference. Read the sponsor list and the topics and it is a hosting infrastructure event: the principal organizer runs an IPv4 leasing marketplace, a silver sponsor serves more than four million customers, and the topic list reads like the ways a hosting business breaks.

Key information

  • Date: September 23 and 24, 2026
  • Location: Radisson Blu Latvija Conference and Spa Hotel, Riga, Latvia
  • Registration: balticnog.org/tickets, with no prices published on the page as we read it
  • Call for papers: closes August 28, 2026
  • Organizer: IPXO, an IPv4 leasing marketplace, listed as principal organizer and coordinator

What Is BalticNOG and Why Does the Second Edition Matter?

BalticNOG is young. The group was founded on December 19, 2024 and held its first meeting nine months later, on September 24 and 25, 2025, at LITEXPO in Vilnius. It describes its mission as bringing together and empowering network professionals across the Baltic region and beyond, and sets an unusually direct target for a community group: becoming one of the largest NOGs in Europe.

The first edition put 45 speakers from 29 countries on stage across two days, by the group’s own count. Moving the second edition to Riga rather than repeating in Vilnius is the clearest signal that the organizers mean the Baltic part of the name rather than the Lithuanian part.

The principal organizer and coordinator is IPXO. Vincentas Grinius is president and co-founder of the group, Donatas Abraitis co-founder, and Paulius Judickas chairman of the board.

Key Topics from the Call for Papers

No 2026 agenda has been published. What exists is the call for papers, which lists the topics the program committee is looking for, and that list is the best available guide to what will be discussed in Riga.

  • BGP security, hijacks and route leaks, covering vulnerabilities in the protocol and mitigation strategies
  • DDoS mitigation and cybersecurity trends, including how attack tactics are evolving
  • IPv6 deployment and transition strategies, from addressing architecture to adoption obstacles
  • Internet routing and interconnection, inter-AS relationships and peering optimization
  • IP leasing, RPKI and resource management, where address scarcity meets routing security
  • Peering, IXPs and regional connectivity, the economics of how traffic moves between networks
  • Policy and regulation, plus network resilience in conflict zones
  • Network automation, AI in networking, and data center and cloud networking

The Speakers Confirmed So Far

Six speakers are confirmed: Mikael Holmberg, a distinguished engineer in the CTO office at Extreme Networks; Thomas Graf, network analytics architect at Swisscom; Dmytro Shypovalov, founder of Vegvisir Systems; Zachary Smith, chief executive of Datum; Scott Fisher, senior principal engineer at Team Cymru; and Marco Schmidt, who manages registration services at the RIPE NCC.

Only one talk title has appeared on the event’s site so far, an August post naming Shypovalov on auto-bandwidth for segment routing. Schmidt’s presence carries the most direct consequence for anyone running address space in Europe, because registration services is the function that decides how addresses are allocated, transferred and documented.

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Registration and Pricing

Attendee ticket prices are not published on the tickets page, which routes to a booking flow instead. The sponsorship rate card, by contrast, is fully public: Diamond at 12,000 euros limited to one slot, Gold at 7,500 limited to three, Silver at 5,000 and Bronze at 3,000. Add-ons run from a 1,000 euro wifi sponsorship through lunch at 3,000, coffee breaks at 5,000, and the badge and evening party at 6,000 each.

The call for papers closes on August 28, which leaves a narrow window for anyone who wants to speak rather than simply attend.

What the Organizers Have Not Published

As of mid-August, the agenda and the ticket prices are not the only things missing. There is also no attendance figure for the 2025 edition, which matters because the site says the event “will bring together around 400 network professionals”. That is a forward-looking expectation for this year, not evidence from last year, and the counters beside it sit under a heading describing a potential audience rather than a turnout.

For a group that has published its sponsorship rate card down to the wifi slot, the first edition’s turnout is the number a prospective sponsor would ask for first, and it is the one number the site does not carry.

Three Reasons Hosting Professionals Should Attend BalticNOG 2026

First, the sponsor list is a hosting list. The principal organizer runs a marketplace for leasing IPv4 addresses, a business that exists because the free pool ran out and hosting providers still need addresses. Hostinger, a silver sponsor, was founded in Kaunas as Hosting Media and says on its own site that it now serves over four million clients. Cherry Servers, a bronze sponsor, sells API-driven bare metal and runs data centers in Lithuania among other locations. DE-CIX, also silver, operates some of the largest internet exchanges in Europe. The RIPE NCC, the registry that allocates address space to essentially every European host, is listed among supporters. Set aside the equipment vendors and Team Cymru’s threat intelligence business, and the rest of the paying list is the address, interconnection and hosting layer.

Second, the topics are a list of ways a hosting business breaks. BGP hijacks and route leaks are how a provider’s customers vanish from the internet without anyone touching the servers. DDoS mitigation is a line on every host’s cost sheet. IPv6 transition is the question of what happens when a host can no longer get IPv4 for new customers. Peering and exchanges determine what a provider pays for transit and how fast its customers’ sites feel. Every hosting company above a certain size runs its own autonomous system and announces its own prefixes, and depends on other people honoring them.

Third, one speaker makes the overlap explicit. Zachary Smith and his brother Jacob founded Packet, the bare metal provider acquired by Equinix in 2020. His current company, Datum, is described by one of its investors as building a virtual meet-me room for the internet, a programmable interconnection layer aimed at organizations running multi-cloud architectures. That is a hosting career and an interconnection product for the cloud ecosystem, presented at a networking conference.