Background and History

Altonet was established as IDWS, or Internet Design and Web Services, in 1998 by two young Internet entrepreneurs, as one of the first ISP’s.

It was established as an internet service provider, primarily to provide website design and hosting for small businesses. It also began to take on subscribers for its dial-up services for email and internet which became the backbone of the company. It was very successful in its uptake of subscribers, and the company grew from its humble beginnings.

In early 2005, the company took on an outside investor who purchased 40% of the shares, and the business was transferred into a newly registered company called Alto Network Communications (Pty) Ltd. The investor later sold its 40% interest to Foneworx Holdings Ltd, a telecommunications company quoted on the ALTx of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

In February 2008, the Financial Director of Foneworx, Gareth Tudor, took early retirement from Fonworx, and bought Foneworx’s shareholding, as Foneworx had decided that an Internet service provider was not part of their core operations, and the original shareholders sold most of their shares in Altonet.

In September 2008, the company name was changed to Altonet (Pty) Ltd in order to align the legal name with the trading name. In October 2008, Mandla Madi, a business consultant, joined the compay and took up shares through his investment company, Jiri Investments (Pty) Ltd, and In November 2009, the original shareholders sold the balance of their shares.

Altonet is now run by Mandla and Gareth – who are both passionate about providing more bandwidth and better services to a country that has been starved of good connectivity. They are proud of the partnerships they have developed with Autonomy (formerly Iron Mountain Digital) for data backup and restore, and Beachhead Solutions for encryption security – both essential cloud-based services in the a world of so much dependancy on digital media. And they are both intensely grateful to Autonomy for backing up their laptops so efficiently – especially when one laptop crashed and the other was stolen!

And the name? Ah well, two directors were having a good meal and enjoying a bottle of wine, and they started wondering what to call their company. No prizes for guessing the name of the wine that prompted the new company name!