Quik Internet (NZ)

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

~ the obit ~

The first archived copy of quik.co.nz is from 25 January 1999 and it opens with an announcement rather than a product: "Quik International announces the establishment of Quik Internet New Zealand to establish Quik Internet franchises throughout New Zealand." The business model is right there in the first line. An American company had worked out that internet access could be sold as a franchise, the way a brand licenses a shop sign, and somebody in Auckland bought the country.

I recognize the shape from a long way off. In Turkey the same years meant a modem that negotiated at 33.6k if the line was behaving, and a bill from whichever provider you had picked that season, Turknet or Superonline before TTNet took over the house for good. The provider was a name on an invoice and a local phone number, and when one got bought by a bigger one you found out from a letter. New Zealand had maybe four million people and the same arrangement, with a Californian brand on top of it.

Quik Internet (NZ) Limited was registered on 24 June 1998, company number 913071, at an address in St Heliers in Auckland. It sold dial-up and later broadband, with a toll-calling product alongside, and English Wikipedia records it employing around twenty-three people under Scott Bartlett as general manager. Two more companies followed the first: a Quik Internet Auckland in August 2001 and a Quik Internet Christchurch in April 2003, which is what a franchise network looks like on a register.

On 4 September 2006 it merged into ihug, which was then the third largest internet provider in the country. This was not a shutdown in the usual sense. The customers were not switched off, they were handed over, and only the brand stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a franchise sold in 1999 ~

The 1999 homepage is a good artifact of what an ISP thought it was selling before broadband. Dial-up accounts came with a free web site. There were free internet training seminars, because a large part of the job in 1999 was teaching people what the thing even was. And the company bragged, in capitals, about being one of the world's largest providers of Microsoft FrontPage 98 hosting, a sentence that could not be written today in any language.

Above that sat a product ladder. The Basic Virtual Website gave you a registered domain, 10MB of disk and 500MB of traffic a month, and the Deluxe added three POP mailboxes and unlimited transfer. Ten megabytes was a reasonable business web site in 1999. By 2005 the front page had been rewritten around a free phone number and a promise that a real person would answer it without a menu.

~ the last homepage ~

The site kept serving for a year after the merger, and the final working capture, from 8 September 2007, carries the notice: "Quik Internet has been part of the ihug family for a few months now, but from September 4th we're fully merging. You'll now be a fully fledged ihug customer." It goes on to promise that the dial-up number and the email address both stay, and that nothing needs doing about the billing. Every line reassures the customer that nothing will change, and nothing did except the name on the bill.

~ three companies, three removals ~

The New Zealand Companies Office keeps the tidy version. Quik Internet (NZ) Limited ran from 24 June 1998 to 27 March 2008. Quik Internet Auckland Limited ran from 21 August 2001 to 31 March 2008, four days behind it. Quik Internet Christchurch Limited lasted longest on paper, from 22 April 2003 to 17 November 2009, three years after the brand it carried had stopped meaning anything.

The apex went to a redirect on 30 January 2008, about eight weeks before the parent company came off the register, and ihug itself was retired by Vodafone that April. The customers who were told in 2006 that they would not have to do a thing were moved twice inside two years, and both times the promise was the same one: keep your address and your number, somebody else owns the wire now.

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