Blacknight recently joined the Irish internet community to celebrate a very special milestone: 30 years of INEX.
From our engineers to our CEO and CTO, we were delighted to be there to support the INEX team, catch up with colleagues from across the industry and, naturally, enjoy a little nostalgia about just how much the internet in Ireland has changed over the past three decades.
Opening the event, INEX CEO Eileen Gallagher spoke about “infrastructure beyond profit”, reflecting on the principles that have shaped INEX from the beginning. While the scale of the organisation and the traffic flowing through its network have changed enormously, the underlying idea remains remarkably familiar: organisations coming together to help Ireland connect.
Today, INEX connects around 120 member networks, with traffic peaks reaching approximately 1.4 Tbps. But throughout the event, the message was clear that INEX is about much more than capacity, ports and traffic. It is about building infrastructure before it is needed, creating resilience and bringing together people with the knowledge and willingness to keep improving it.
As Eileen put it, INEX has been built “route by route, member by member, year by year.”
There was plenty of looking back too. Talks explored the early days of the Irish internet, from the first connections in the 1990s and the arrival of Ireland’s first ISPs, through the rise of video streaming and global content providers, right up to today’s world of AI, cybersecurity and ever-increasing digital dependency.
INEX Chair Brian Nisbet also reflected on the huge amount of work that goes on quietly behind the scenes to make the internet appear to simply work. As more and more of everyday life depends on digital infrastructure, that resilience has never been more important.
One of the most striking reminders from the day was that there is probably nobody in Ireland who isn’t touched in some way by the infrastructure INEX helps support, even if most people will never know its name.
Thirty years on, that community spirit remains at the heart of INEX. People and organisations giving their time, expertise and support to build something that benefits everyone.
Congratulations to Eileen, the INEX team, its board, members and everyone who has contributed over the past 30 years. We’re proud to be part of the community and look forward to seeing where the next 30 years takes Ireland’s internet.
About the Author: Chloe Murray
