DART Internet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DART Internet, was an internet service provider founded in 2003 by James Edward Austin and based in Fortitude Valley, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. It offered cut-price internet access with unlimited data usage, and discounted setup fees which at the time were unknown in the Australian ISP Industry.
DART quickly grew beyond its system capabilities, running out of bandwidth frequently, DART was part or a merger to form Direct Corporation in late 2003, in which three additional directors, Ranald McDonald, Michael Looke, and Stephen Thompson were added to the board.
In a rash business decision by the company's new Managing Director, Ran McDonald, it obtained billing and management system services from Telenet Australia, further hindering the business functions because the new systems were largely incompatible with the data held on the original systems.
Many customers reported that after the migration to the Telenet systems, they were being double billed for internet services, and that their accounts were being randomly disabled for no apparent reason.
Reports from its staff began to emerge on Whirlpool.net.au that it had failed to pay any employee income tax or superannuation, and that the business was several weeks behind in paying wages.
In late 2004 or early 2005, the administrators of Direct Data announced an agreement between DART and Direct that saw the DART business sold to Hotkey Internet Services for between $200,000 and $300,000 - a fraction of what it was originally worth.
