Our Story

BORN on the remote riverbanks of the mighty Murray River with a $20 prepaid data dongle and on the back of 10 years market, industry and Aboriginal consumer research INTTN was registered as a private company in late 2016. Today we are the only Aboriginal owned business of its kind in Australia providing a central inclusion and access point for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders organisations, communities and people along with being a business to work with Governments, Industry and Charity in partnership to address Indigenous Procurement Policy, Reconciliation Action Plans and Closing the Gap among other strategies and plans.

AT THE BEGINNING WE WERE KNOCKED BACK and TURNED AWAY by people we approached and spoke to about the INTTN idea often responded with “It’s a great idea with good social impact intentions but it will never work”. A negative opinion of the INTTN idea is one thing, but the fact it meant very few from different sectors chose not to work with us at the beginning made our journey all the much harder, yet we became all the more determined to make a dream idea a reality for Australia. As a result of knock back after knock back for minor start-up investment it was a friendship between two experienced entrepreneurs that resulted in first investment of funds into INTTN as seed funding. Founder Mr. Jade Miller provided under $5k in cash along with his expertise and time free of charge and Mr. Kerry Wiltshire funded operations for the first 12 months. In effect, social enterprise funding social enterprise.

Now let us come back to the knock backs we experienced in 2016/17, in response, we immediately began to build our customer database with the intent to demonstrate to the industry and other stakeholders that INTTN is here and here to stay and not going anywhere we approached the same potential partners and individuals that rejected us and with customer database in-hand that clearly demonstrated a high need for INTTN plus enhancing our ability to demonstrate INTTN can be a viable business and partnership proposition – we successfully achieved our “Strategic Partnership Acquisitions” over a 6 month period including Industry, government and charitable partners all changing their minds and deciding to partner with INTTN. At this point our customer database possess 1000’s of customers. From this point, in 2018 we delivered a variety of proud and first time operational milestones, including:

• OUR FIRST INDIGENOUS CUSTOMER was activated on the nbn™️ home broadband in early 2018.

• OUR FIRST INDIGENOUS WORK CREW was deployed to install fixed wireless infrastructure in late 2018.

• OUR FIRST INDIGENOUS CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM was set-up and servicing our customers

• OUR FIRST INDIGENOUS ETHICAL SALES TEAM was trained and deployed

• OUR FIRST BULK ORDER FOR MOBILE DEVICES was order by a corporate customer

• OUR FIRST BULK ACTIVATION OF MOBILE SIM PLANS was activated on carrier networks by corporate customer

In 2019, COVID19 ARRIVED on Australian shores and INTTN with our headquarters in Melbourne, Victoria has pushed through 6 State Government announced and enforced statewide lockdowns which negatively impacted the business, but it did not stop us, 2021 and INTTN has not only continued to generate business under tuff conditions between 2019 and 2021, but in late 2021 INTTN has began its COVID19 Response and Recovery Program. The demand for technology, telecom and digital services is strong and growing day-by-day. INTTN is still here and not going anywhere in fact just recently the Australian Government via the National Indigenous Australians Agency published its Indigenous Digital Inclusion Plan – Discussion Paper and to demonstrate INTTN remains a leader in the market will submit its Discussion Paper Response in November 2021 where we are confident our journey and story will provide a variety of valuable and unique insights for the discussion paper and Australian Government.