MUMBAI, AUG 1: One of the big mysteries for Mumbai's Netizens is why it takes hours to surf the Net from certain places in the city, while surfing is very fast in other areas. The users don't even know how good or bad Mumbai's Internet speed is compared to the rest of the world. But from Monday onwards, 14 cyber agents, including veteran actor Shammi Kapoor, are daily going to monitor speeds on the information superhighways from various parts of the city to devise a reliable barometer in this regard, known as the Mumbai Internet Index (MIT).The MIT is a brainchild of Internet Users Club of India (IUCI), which will run a computer programme from 14 spots to not only highlight areas in the city that offer the poorest Net connectivity, it will also provide a daily ready reference index of all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the city.Talking of this project, chairman of IUCI Shammi Kapoor said: ``The formulation of MIT will be a step towards creating a platform for healthy comparison, similar to the dailyindex of any standard stock exchange like, say, BSE or NSE.''Every day, 14 IUCI representatives scattered all over the city will diligently run the MIT programme from their terminals ten times a day to gauge the speed of surfing. The analysed results will be shown on the IUCI web-page at the end of the day.``With the entry of private ISPs, it has become all the more confusing for users to choose the most reliable ISP connection. We want to help Netizens by giving them well-tabled facts,'' said Kapoor, a self-confessed Net addict. But the actor won't have to be present before his terminal ten times a day since the programme automatically calculates the time taken to reach some of the popular home pages. Kapoor will have to merely switch on his computer in the morning, the machine will do the rest.One of the chief architects of the programme, Sonal Kotecha, said the 50 most visited sites on the Net among them Yahoo, Netscape, CNN, Hotmail and Warnerbros will be visited by the 14 IUCI members and thetotal time taken to open their respective home pages tabulated ten times a day. She added: ``The top 50 sites were chosen as per the international ratings of Media Matrix. Unfortunately, no Indian names feature here.''MIT will be the inverse of the average time taken to reach these 50 sites. Each of the four ISPs - VSNL, MTNL, Satyam and Mantra - will be used for this. ``The ISP with the lowest MIT rating may perhaps crib at the end of the day, but our programme is merely to inform users about the standards, so there can be a permanent benchmark,'' said Sonal.The Chairman of Internet Service Providers Association of India, Rajiv Arora, has welcomed the project. ``Netizens must know if VSNL is better or MTNL, if a dial-up connection is quicker or a leased line,'' he said. Chairman and managing director of VSNL, Amitabh Kumar, said: ``MIT is a good idea. Internet speed depends on various factors like the modem, telephone exchange, region, etc. With MIT, it will be easier to study the deficiencies in oursystem.''
