Greg Hicks and Simon Hackett make brilliant internet forays with Adam and Internode
The Internode offices in Grenfell Street, Adelaide. South Australia's company biggest tech company in 2010 was taken over, in turn, by iiNet and TPG Telecom.
Greg Hicks (Adam Internet) and Simon Hackett (Internode) put Adelaide at the early internet cutting edge with their service providing companies.
Hicks’ venture started as a hobby from his home in Flagstaff Hill in 1986 and formed Adam in 1991 – the same year as Hackett’s Internode.
Both companies grew rapidly with their pace-setting ventures and were taken over in 2011-13 by Western Australian provider iiNet but have retained their own identities. In turn, iiNet was taken over by TPG Telecom in 2015.
Greg Hicks began in 1986 by creating bulletin boards that preceded the internet with users dialling into a computer. Adam Internet became a leading South Australian internet service provider and data warehouse supplier from 1991. Between 1996 and 2012, its market value from $100,000 to $70 million and, at its peak, employed more than 200.
Hicks and Adam won entrepreneur and second generation family business of the year awards.
Simon Hackett’s Internode pushed the boundaries in internet service. Among its strings of innovations were:
• The Coorong (2001) and Yorke Peninsula (2001) communications networks offering low-cost voice and data services to regional customers.
• The largest gaming network in Australia (in daily player count).
• Internode’s infrastructure company Agile installed its own equipment in the Telstra exchange at Meningie in 2003: the first in regional Australia where ADSL was available from a non-Telstra DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer).
• In 2005, Agile extended the national private backbone for Internode to connect to the United States.
• In 2008, Internode launched a national Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the first in Australia.
• Internode’s contiguous wireless hotspot network, formerly known as CityLAN, a high-speed wi-fi network open to the public with coverage at hotspots throughout Adelaide CBD.
