A brief history of Network Overdrive
I want to give you a brief introduction to Network Overdrive and where we’ve come from, what we hope to be doing now, and what we plan in the future.
You might be interested to know that before Network Overdrive started, my experience was working in the ISP industry in the 1990s. We started Network Overdrive in 1999. In those times, it was heady days for the ISP industry, especially in Australia. It was just starting out. 56k speeds was fast. People got excited when they moved to 64k. We were, as an ISP, moving from our whole infrastructure being analog modems, and moving to digital and then obviously ADSL came on board.
What we learned is that people wanted their email and their Internet all the time. They were accessing their systems from home, or they were using their business systems more often on the weekends. So we had to develop a mindset of running a business 24/7, 365 days a year. When we were talking to our business customers, we found that they were not used to this operation. Their IT systems were not developed to run like this.
And they will often ask us for advice on how to do that. They would ask us to come to them, but we, as an ISP, would say no. This was really the start for us to form Network Overdrive on the mantra that we come to you. So we bring this idea of the remote and managing your wide area network, your presence online, your Internet, and your local computers. We wanted to end the blame game, pointing fingers between this is a local issue or an Internet issue. Just cut that out and get on with the job of fixing the problem.
That was greatly received, and Network Overdrive has been successful since 1999.