Internet Time now

Which is Internet Time?

At the end of the 90s Internet Time was created and commercialized by the Swatch Group. Rather than splitting the actual and virtually occurring days into 24 hrs and 60 min per hrs, the Internet time system splits the days into 1000 ".beats". Every.beat is 1 min and 26.4 seconds.

The Internet Time is built on a new meridian (as distinct from the Greenwich meridian). The new meridian passes through the Swatch offices in Biel, Switzerland, and is known as the BMT Meridian. The Biel Mean Time (BMT) is another Swatch invention. There is a connection to the Central European winter/standard time, which is 1 hr plus VAT.

If it is midnight in BMT, the Internet time is @000 punches, midday @500 punches. Using the standard fractional system instead of the old 24-hour, 60-minute and 60-second systems, it makes timing more complex. The . beat time computations are simple, @345 + 456 in . beat = @801, in comparison to e.g. 3:45:20 + 2 hrs, 25 min, 45 sec, where the seconds, min and hrs all have to be added together.

There is no need to change time zones - Internet time is the same everywhere. Using the Biel meridian leads to an undesirable extra meridian - the Greenwich meridian is the world's default meridian. Second and not beats is the fundamental time in the International System of Units (and the use of .beats would make the system complicated).

Internet time system may seem more like a business case than a true system. A milliday would be a more specific name than beats. Given that the present hours/minutes/seconds system is already widely used, it is very unlikely that the Internet Time System will be able to do so.

We already have a shared time system without time zone and summer time changeover in widespread use - UrbanTC - which should be used instead. Which is the standard time? Which time zone is Indiana?