The two have been demanding arrears for telephone line access for which they are charging private ISPs Rs 15,000 per line. Not only that, they wanted it with retrospective effect which would have blown a hole through any ISP's business plan.

TRAI told DoT and MTNL to take a walk. Hopefully, they will, and a fair one at that. Private ISPs have also starting cribbing once again about the infrastructure advantage that MTNL and VSNL have and how they are using it to cut their internet access rates. Not that the access rates on offer in India by the two former monopolies are anywhere close to what's being charged in the US and Europe where internet surfing is becoming increasingly free.

Private ISPs have also yelped that VSNL, being the sole provider of internationalinternet gateways in India, is ripping them off. The rates, while they have come down to about Rs 40-50 lakh-odd for a 2 Mbps pipe from Rs 72 lakh earlier, are still too steep. In fact, one could go so far as to label them as daylight robbery.

VSNL officials couch the tendency to fleece private ISPs under the guise of high infrastructure set up costs. The rates being charged definitely should be investigated by the TRAI and are a case for the Monopolies & Restrictive Trade Practices Commission.

This writer believes that VSNL and MTNL (it comes in for the last mile or so we have been told) should charge no more than Rs 15-20 lakh for a 2 Mbps pipe, all costs included if the spread of the internet is to be encouraged in India.

VSNL and MTNL may end up making a marginal profit but the volumes are sure to be high as even large corporates - apart from private ISPs - may be incentivised to take up leased lines. TRAI and VSNL folks are you listening? Or are you going to continue to play deaf?

Junkbusters

Fed up to your teeth with banner ads that keep popping up on your monitor every time you log onto a website? Well, anti-ad programmes are what you should try. In most cases, these programmes remove the annoying images and leave a blank spot or hyperlink in its place.

You can get more information on how to banish annoying banners and images by logging into Jason Katlett's Junkbuster (www.junkbuster.com). It hawks shareware that helps you to blank out bugging images. Other alternatives are Opera (www.operasoftware.com), a shareware browser that helps you to load text pages at a blink of an eye and then hit a key to get the pictures up. Opera normally nukes animations, and is gaining currency amongst the anti-advertising fraternity.

Two new products, AdsOff! (www.adsoff.com) and interMute (www.intermute.com), offer users a range of options. Consider: InterMute's control panel allows computer users to shut off ads, animations, cookies, pop-up windows, automatic background music, Java andJavaScript. Each filter can be individually enabled or disabled on all sites or on a site-by-site basis.

AdsOff! a Windows only software currently accelerates your downloads even when it is set up for its least intrusive settings. But, beware, these software needn't work every time. Also, Web content developers are catching on: They are creating pages that just collapse if even a single element is not allowed to appear on your browser. So you may end up not getting a looksee at the information you were searching for.

Netscape out of style

This one is for Netscape lovers. Your favourite browser is increasingly going out of style. A survey by Websidestory shows that 44.7 per cent of Web surfers are using the IE4.x browser. The IE5.x version is being used by 24.9 per cent of surfers with 3.6 per cent using the earlier nearly outdated Explorer 3.x. Compared to this, just 22 per cent of surfers favour Netscape Navigator 4.x, with 2.3 per cent using Navigator 3.x.

What is alarming is the manner inwhich Netscape is sliding on the popularity charts. It has fallen a steep eight per cent since March 1999 when one in three surfers were using the Navigator, as against one in four currently. The reason: The increasing number of PC vendors who are bundling IE as a pre-installed package on new machines. This is surely going to give Microsoft-phobes some more muck to hurl at the software giant.

By the way, the results were culled from data gathered from 114,000 websites worldwide, with over 31 million individual visitors.

The writer is the editor of The Indian Cab&Sat Reporter. Feel free to email with your comments to television@vsnl.com or television@hotmail.com