ihug

» see ihug.co.nz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Eight thousand dollars from your father is not a funding round. That is what Nick and Tim Wood started with in Auckland in 1994, and the name they picked was an acronym almost nobody used out loud: Internet Home Users Group. In Australia, where they started trading in 1997, the same company went by The Internet Group, or TIG. By 1999 the two brothers and their father were on the National Business Review Rich List with a combined estimated worth of seventy five million dollars.

I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey in the same decade, paying per minute and watching the clock, which is the detail that makes ihug's 1995 move land properly for me. They were the first New Zealand ISP to sell a flat rate account. The clock stopped mattering for their customers four years before it stopped mattering for me, at the other end of the world, on an island chain with worse international bandwidth than anywhere in Europe.

The company grew by buying. In 1997 it merged with ES Net, an Efficient Software operation out of Dunedin covering the South Island, which took the combined subscriber base to ten thousand. In 2004 it bought Wave Internet and PC Connect and picked up ten thousand more customers in Waikato and the Bay of Plenty. Quik merged into it on 4 September 2006. By 2005 there were more than a hundred thousand internet and phone subscribers on the books, and ihug was the third largest ISP in the country behind Xtra and TelstraClear, having been the largest before 2000.

~ the record ~

~ the dish on the roof ~

In 1997 ihug set up SatNet and a satellite broadband service called Ultra. This is worth sitting with. New Zealand in the late nineties had a small population spread over two long islands and a copper network that was not going to reach most of it at any useful speed, so a company founded three years earlier by two brothers started selling satellite downlinks to households. It was faster than anything on the phone line and it was awkward, since the uplink still went out over dial-up.

They sold the satellite infrastructure in 2005 to concentrate on ADSL, by which point ihug had become the largest wholesaler of Telecom's ADSL product. The dish came down and the business became a reseller of somebody else's copper. Eighteen months later it was for sale again.

~ the year it lost 4,500 sites ~

In 1998 somebody broke into the machine hosting ihug's customer homepages and deleted everything on it. Over four thousand five hundred websites went. In 1998 a personal homepage on your ISP's server was frequently the only copy, written straight into the host and never mirrored anywhere. Whatever those pages were, they are the part of ihug that is genuinely unrecoverable, and they were gone ten years before the company itself was.

~ the two sales ~

In 2002 ihug hired Martin Wylie as chief executive with a specific job: find a buyer. It took a year. The Australian ISP iiNet bought the company in 2003 for NZ$82 million, nine years and eight thousand dollars after it started.

iiNet held it for three years and then sold the New Zealand business to Vodafone in October 2006 for around forty one million, after interest from Kordia, then a Television New Zealand subsidiary, and from the competitor Orcon. Vodafone was the country's biggest mobile operator and had no fixed-line internet arm, so it bought one. Mark Rushworth, a former ihug chief executive, went across to Vodafone New Zealand as its marketing manager.

~ the leftover addresses ~

The New Zealand Herald ran the notice on 23 January 2008 under the headline Vodafone shuts down ihug brand. The retirement happened that April. Customers were moved onto Vodafone's own internet services and were allowed to keep their ihug email addresses, which Vodafone went on hosting for years afterward before eventually dropping email altogether.

ihug.co.nz does not resolve today. One NZ, which is what Vodafone New Zealand is now called, still keeps a page at one.nz/ihug, so the last surviving piece of a company that once put satellite dishes on New Zealand roofs is a support URL on its buyer's site.

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