About Us

IP River began with the passion of our founder, Peter Wightman, who started out building PCs as a hobby. Determined to formalise his skills, he trained in IT and gained early experience by working two jobs — and even working for free — just to accelerate his learning.

Peter soon became a self-employed IT consultant, collaborating with other engineers. As clients increasingly asked him to take on network requirements, he saw a major shift: the desktop and physical IT infrastructure were becoming less relevant, while the real power lay in the internet.

Upskilling into networking, he discovered that clients could be better served by installing internet connections directly and distributing them intelligently using IP routing and traffic shaping. A successful pilot with local businesses proved the concept, and scaling became the natural next step.

The breakthrough came by moving infrastructure into data centres with direct interconnects, enabling nationwide delivery, stronger commercials, and the control and tools needed to add real value. This vision secured the first investment, which was used to build out the network.

Crucially, our early experience as resellers and consumers of internet services gave us a front-row seat to the frustrations of dealing with legacy providers: limited tools, poor transparency, restrictive pricing, and lack of control. Those lessons became the foundation for IP River. We set out to build the platform we wished we'd had ourselves — something simple, flexible, transparent, and powerful enough to truly serve customers.

From the beginning, IP River embraced the channel model, playing to our engineering strengths and creating a product designed for partners. Today, those same founding principles continue to guide us as we expand our connectivity portfolio worldwide.