IETF 126 Highlights

The IETF 126 meeting was held 18–24 July 2026 at the Hilton Vienna Park in Vienna, Austria, and online, hosted by Cisco. The week included the IETF Hackathon and Code Sprint, the New Participants' Program, five Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions, and more than 100 working group and research group sessions. The Applied Network Research Workshop also took place during the IETF 126 meeting week.

The IETF 126 proceedings provide full materials and recordings, and the "Suggested IETF 126 Sessions for Getting Familiar with New Topics" post is a good companion for background on many of the sessions below. With so much happening during an IETF Meeting, it is not possible to follow everything that happens during the week; this draft is built from the IETF 126 agenda, BoF and session descriptions published ahead of the meeting, and materials posted to the Datatracker. Please also see the photo gallery from IETF 126.

Wednesday, 22 July 2026
The plenary is the single meeting session addressed to the whole IETF community, and IETF 126's followed the usual structure: a welcome and greeting from meeting host Cisco, followed by reports from the IETF Chair and IESG, the IAB, the IRTF, the Nominating Committee, the IETF Trust/IPMC, and the IETF Administration LLC. This year's Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) winners were recognized in front of the full community, as is customary, ahead of their talks later in the week at the IRTF Open session. The evening closed with open microphone sessions for the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the IETF Administration LLC Board of Directors (IETF LLC), where any participant can raise questions directly with leadership.