Adam Internet

» see adam.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Adam Internet was the internet service provider for South Australia, and it got there by a route that almost no surviving carrier can claim. In 1986 there was an Adelaide Amiga Club. The club had a bulletin board, set up in 1987 and run by the user group until its sysop, Greg Hicks, took it over. In 1989 that board went commercial as a multi-line system built on TBBS software, briefly the largest bulletin board in the Southern Hemisphere and for years the most popular one in Australia. When dial-up internet arrived, the board already had the modem banks and the customers sitting on them.

By 2009 Adam had more than 80,000 customers and about a hundred staff. It sold the whole ISP catalog of the period, from dial-up through to colocation, and a WiMAX service called AdamMax that won a three million dollar state government contract to fill in metropolitan coverage gaps. Wikipedia credits the company with roughly 35 percent of the South Australian internet market, a figure that has sat on the page for years with nothing behind it. What is solid is the position: a provincial ISP big enough that the national carriers wanted it, small enough that buying it was an afternoon's work for either of them.

The company's last useful act was to become the thing two larger companies fought over. Telstra announced a sixty million dollar purchase in October 2012. The competition regulator spent the following months on it, the deal expired, and iiNet bought Adam for the identical price a fortnight later. What iiNet bought it was then obliged to absorb, and in December 2015 Adam Internet stopped existing as a provider. Services and customers moved to iiNet, which is how the encyclopedia puts it.

~ the case file ~

~ the bulletin board years ~

What Adam kept from its board days was the habit of hosting things locally. It ran unmetered services that did not count against a customer's monthly quota. There was a gaming network called 3FL running servers for whatever people were playing that year, and a file repository called FileArena that carried Linux distributions and a Tucows mirror alongside streams for local radio stations like Fresh 92.7. This was normal ISP behavior in an era when international transit cost real money and traffic to your own servers in the same city cost nothing, and it produced providers with personalities.

In Turkey I was on TTNet for most of that period, which was the phone company with a brand on it. There was no city in the name, and no reason to feel anything about it either way. An ISP that came out of a computer club and still ran a file mirror for its own subscribers is a species I know from reading, not from paying. The difference is not nostalgia, it is market structure. Australia had room for a regional provider with 80,000 customers on it. Turkey did not.

~ the deal the regulator stopped ~

The Telstra attempt is the interesting half. Telstra owned the fixed copper network that its competitors had to buy wholesale access to, so a Telstra-owned retail ISP in South Australia raised the obvious question of what price Adam would pay compared to everyone else. The ACCC published a detailed statement of issues in late December 2012, most of it about the South Australian fixed-line broadband market. Macquarie Telecom and Vodafone Hutchison lobbied against the deal, and so did iiNet. The commission aimed to decide by 7 February 2013, then suspended its own timeline a fortnight early at Telstra's request, and the process never properly restarted. On 23 July 2013 Telstra's chief customer service officer Gordon Ballantyne said the company had not been able to secure approval by the contractual end date. Adam's executive chairman Greg Hicks called it unfortunate.

Fourteen days later iiNet announced it was buying Adam for sixty million dollars in cash, noting in the same breath that its own acquisition had already cleared the ACCC. The acquisition was not a rescue, it was a consolidation that one buyer was allowed to make and the other was not. iiNet's chief executive Michael Malone said the right things about loyal customer bases and strong reputations in core markets, and the filing said iiNet's total broadband subscribers would pass 900,000.

~ what adelaide lost ~

The 2015 integration was never announced with a date anyone wrote down, so this grave carries a month and no day. The citation on the sentence that records it has been marked as needed since July 2024. For a company that was the default answer to "who do you have your internet with" across an entire Australian state, the ending is a line in an encyclopedia nobody sourced.

iiNet itself went to TPG in 2015, the same year Adam disappeared into it, so the customers Telstra was blocked from acquiring changed hands twice inside two years anyway. The domain still resolves and still refuses to answer on either scheme, which is where it has sat since the brand came off the bills.

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