The first BalticNOG opened with a keynote from APNIC’s chief scientist, who asked what a decade of encryption has cost network operators. Before it ended, Ukrainian speakers had explained how a registry, the country’s ISPs and a cable factory keep running under attack. That was Vilnius last September, and our co-founder Konrad Keck was in the room; he came back recommending the event without reservation. The second edition opens in Riga on September 23 and 24, and the Vilnius record is the best evidence of what those two days are likely to deliver.

We covered the Riga program, sponsors and logistics in our announcement earlier this month; this piece is about what the first edition actually delivered. The group itself moved fast. The idea started as a conversation between Paulius Judickas and Vincentas Grinius at a RIPE 89 event in Prague, the association was formally established on December 19, 2024, and nine months later a full two-day program ran at LITEXPO in Vilnius. The official speaker list records 45 speakers from 29 countries; pre-event materials projected more than 400 participants.

Encryption Doubts, 800G Optics and Vinted’s Data Center

Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC and one of the internet’s foundational researchers, delivered the opening keynote, “Networking in the Dark,” asking what a decade of encrypting nearly every communication layer has cost network operators: whether the internet has become a “dumb pipe” that can no longer detect threats, optimize performance or understand what it carries.

The rest of the two days ran from hardware to policy. Thomas Weible presented on network reliability at up to 800G, Donatas Abraitis walked through underused BGP features in FRRouting, and Rytis Lebedys showed how Vinted, the marketplace founded in Vilnius, runs its data center network. Pavel Odintsov covered BGP FlowSpec for DDoS mitigation, Mikael Holmberg took apart the myths around AI in networks, and the second day closed on interconnection, including Michael Takeuchi’s reminder that an internet exchange is not IP transit and Aleksi Suhonen’s question of whether IPv6-only exchanges are coming. For hosting infrastructure teams, that covers most of the network layer in one program: optics, routing, DDoS mitigation, data center networking, interconnection and IPv6.

BalticNOG 2026: What the Baltic Network Operators Meeting in Riga Means for Hosting Providers

Ukraine Was Not a Topic in Vilnius, It Was Three Sessions

The program’s most distinctive thread came from Ukraine. Dmytro Kohmanyuk, co-founder of Hostmaster, the organization that operates Ukraine’s .ua domain, led the resilience panel, bringing the wartime experience of registry and DNS operations; he now lives in Vilnius. Olena Kushnir, a co-founder of the Ukrainian operator community NOGUA, and Viktoriia Opanasiuk, co-founder of the ISP Viner Telecom, presented on how the country’s providers keep Ukraine online. Part of that resilience, Opanasiuk’s talk argued, comes from Ukraine’s decentralized market of more than 4,000 ISPs.

The numbers came from Valeriia Yuryma, chief executive of DeepNet Group, a Ukrainian producer of fiber optic cable and telecom systems whose production sites were partly destroyed by airstrikes in the spring of 2025. The figures in her talk: more than 30,000 kilometers of networks destroyed and over 4,300 base stations damaged, even as median mobile speeds rose by 15 percent and fixed-broadband speeds by 62 percent. Her operational playbook included a “Red Mode” in which decisions during a blackout or attack drop from two signatures to one and other high-risk approvals shift to pre-set limits, plus communication plans that assume no internet at all: walkie-talkies, satellite messengers and SMS gateways.

The Riga call for papers carries a whole track for it: cybersecurity and network resilience in conflict zones. Vilnius showed what that looks like when it is a production report rather than a research area. For the Baltic states, none of it is an imported concern: after repeated damage to energy and communication cables in the Baltic Sea, NATO launched Baltic Sentry in January 2025 to strengthen the protection of critical undersea infrastructure. The conflict-resilience track sits inside the region’s operating reality, not beside it.

Four of Riga’s Six Announced Speakers Already Spoke in Vilnius

The continuity between editions is easy to measure. Of the six speakers named so far for Riga, four were on the Vilnius program: Mikael Holmberg, Dmytro Shypovalov, Scott Fisher and Marco Schmidt. The two additions are Thomas Graf of Swisscom and Zachary Smith of Datum. A second edition that keeps two-thirds of its announced lineup from the first is carrying the Vilnius formula of deep technical talks plus regional context over to Riga.

The Trip Itself Is Part of the Case

By moving from Vilnius to Riga in its second year, the conference is effectively touring the Baltic capitals, and that suits the material. The regional context keeps showing up in the program itself: a Vilnius-founded marketplace presenting its data center network, a Ukrainian registry operator now based in the city, and a community young enough that its origin story fits in one Prague hallway conversation. The region is not just the venue; it is part of what attendees go there to understand.

A disclosure belongs next to a recommendation this direct: we are a media partner of BalticNOG 2026, listed among the event’s supporters and fellows. Konrad cannot make Riga this year, and no one from our newsroom will be there, which we note with genuine regret. The recommendation stands regardless: anyone running networks or hosting infrastructure in the region should spend those two September days in Riga.