“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

– Winston Churchill.

We have been here before.  With something that felt just as obscure at the time. Just as unproven.  It is just as quietly inevitable.

In the early 2000s, I worked on the front line at iiNet, on the floor of the tech support call centre. It was anything but glamorous, yet it was a front-row seat to what felt like a revolution. The company had been born in the garage of Michael Malone’s parents a few years earlier, and by the time I joined, it had become the little telco that could.

We were moving from dial-up to ADSL1. Testing VOIP. Troubleshooting setups that most people barely understood. The work was unpredictable. Customers were often hostile. It was personal. And it taught us more about solutions and remedies than any manual ever could.

I was there when iiNet became an acquisition machine. When it absorbed its competitors one after another, integrating their systems, their customers, their mess. I was there when the national dial-up number rolled out and when the awards started arriving, one after another, recognising iiNet as Australia’s leading ISP. I watched the launch of ADSL2, pushing speeds further and boundaries further still.

That was what change looked like. Not an announcement. Not a headline. Just a quiet shift, a quiet adaptation unfolding across a country.

iiNet was able to move quickly because it had nothing holding it back. It launched new products before anyone else dared to. It bought smaller companies that others overlooked. And it earned its reputation not by being the biggest, but by being the most responsive and innovative. Telstra and Optus had the weight of legacy behind them. We had speed. That difference mattered.

I watched iiNet grow into a billion-dollar company. I watched it chase mobile, television and national expansion. I watched it push into the business services market and go head-to-head with giants.

Now, years later, there is a familiarity.

The quiet build. The friction. The sense that something is forming on the bleeding edge.

This time, it’s the new internet.

A new network. New protocols. New structures. New tech stacks.

Crypto and distributed ledger technology do not yet carry the polish of maturity. But they carry the same feeling of forward motion. The same texture of potential. Beneath the noise and speculation, there are people building systems with care and intent. They are rebuilding the rails for how value moves, how identity is verified, how ownership is recorded.

It is not perfect. It is not always easy to explain. But neither was the internet in its early years. It took time. It took trust. It took people willing to test it before anyone told them it was safe.

Perhaps that is why World Mobile resonates with me. The intersection of telecommunications and blockchain feels personal. Familiar. A reminder of where I began, and why this next chapter matters.  It is people on the ground, in natural disasters, building infrastructure in complex and difficult environments where the map thins out. Balloons were launched into the sky and mesh networks were stitched across towns by everyday people.

The change on that front isn’t about leading with disruption. It is about leading for access, connection and trust. With infrastructure designed to be shared rather than owned. Blockchain, in this case, is not branding. It is the architecture that holds the network together.

In Australia I see that same instinct taking shape. Founders building custody solutions. Tokenising real world assets. Automating settlement. Not because they are bored. Not because they are chasing profit. But because something is missing. Because they see what is broken and feel responsible for building what comes next.

We see the institutions waiting. Watching. Wanting certainty. Needing someone else to go first. But those working in digital assets and blockchain know better than most that certainty does not come before the work. It comes later earned by those willing to build in imperfect conditions, before the systems are proven, before the outcomes are guaranteed.

Progress arrives messy. It arrives in fragments. In baby steps. In decisions made by people who can’t wait for permission. It is uncomfortable. But it turns out, that is how real solutions are built.

Bio:

Amy-Rose Goodey: Leadership at the Digital Economy Council of Australia (DECA), currently Amy-Rose is the CEO and Managing Director of the Digital Economy Council of Australia (DECA), formerly known as Blockchain Australia

You can read the previous article by Amy-Rose on our Guest Post Blog.

Oryginally published at:

https://spektrumlab.io/we-have-been-here-before-article-by-amy-rose-goodey/