Welcome back to the Founders' Forum column. Based on your e-mail responses it seems that more and more WebTVers are coming here to learn about WebTV Networks and the Internet. I'm thrilled to see that!

In last month's column, we began our "under the hood" look at the technology we use to deliver the WebTV experience. We focused on the Internet terminal last month, and this month we're going to take a look at the WebTV Network. And if you read all the way through to the end, I'll share the results of last month's survey of signatures, and invite you to respond to this month's question.

While observant Club WebTV members have probably already realized it from our company's name, some people don't realize that WebTV Networks runs an online network. In some ways we manage the largest online network in the world! I'll explain why we say this later on, but for now let's start at the beginning, from your point of view. Remember when you first took your WebTV Internet terminal home from the store and connected it to your television and the phone jack? When you first installed the terminal, it made a special call to an 800 number. At the other end of the 800 number a WebTV Network computer (which is also commonly referred to as a server) answered the phone. This computer is known as the Preregistration Server. We chose this name because it is the very first server that the WebTV Internet terminal "speaks" to. Your terminal talks to the Preregistration server even before you first register as a subscriber.

Now, typically when two pieces of equipment "talk" over the phone line they trade digital information. But in this case the most important piece of information that the Preregistration server received is not from your WebTV Internet terminal, but from the phone company. The Preregistration server takes advantage of a service called ANI (Automatic Number Identification), offered by the phone company. This service is similar to CallerID, giving the receiver of a phone call the phone number of the incoming call.

So as soon as the connection is made the Preregistration server knows where you are calling from. It uses the area code and the prefix from your phone number to find the nearest WebTV Network phone numbers, and send them back to the terminal. Then, your terminal hangs up, ending a call which takes only a few seconds. From then on it will use the phone numbers that the Preregistration server sent to it. Most of the time these numbers are local and toll-free calls, but your WebTV Internet terminal will tell you if it doesn't believe that they are.

I mentioned earlier that the WebTV Network could be considered the largest online network in the world. One of the most common ways to measure the size of a network is by the number of POPs, or Points Of Presence, that it has. As far as we know, the WebTV Network has, by a large margin, more POPs than any other online network in the world. The reason that we are able to provide so many POPs is that we work with a number of large and effective Internet providers who actually operate the modems; we rent them on your behalf. The access providers include large companies like Concentric Networks, UUNET, ZipLink, and PSINET, plus a whole bunch of other smaller but equally effective providers.

You gain a number of benefits from this setup. First of all, the odds are much higher that you will have a POP that you can reach with a local call. Also, because your terminal knows multiple phone numbers, there is a good chance that even if one of your providers is busy or having problems you can still gain access to the Internet. The terminal knows to rollover to the next phone number if the current one does not connect. That's pretty neat -- just ask your friends who have Internet access on their PCs how difficult it is for them to get online.

Once you're online the WebTV Network provides you with a great deal of functionality. Just about everything that you see on your TV screen is delivered by the Network: the web pages, mail, Favorites, your home page, Explore, and newsgroups. The software in the WebTV Internet terminal makes this possible by providing the individual ingredients (like being able to show text or a picture on the screen), but it is the Network that combines everything together for you.

This means that, once we test and verify that a new feature is ready, we can deliver it to you literally overnight. In fact, on June 18, we did upgrade Favorites during the night! Also, we can continue to develop more and more features like newsgroups and bring them to you quickly too. Probably the biggest benefit of the Network is that, by putting so much functionality into it, we were able to keep the price of the WebTV Internet terminal at about that of a VCR!

As I mentioned last month, all of your permanent storage -- your mail, your setup preferences, your favorites, and everything that gives your terminal your "personality" -- are automatically stored in the service. Have you noticed a split second delay when using the save option in the options panel? During that pause, the WebTV Internet terminal is sending the Network the URL and a tiny thumbnail picture of the current web page. The URL and the image are then stored with all of your other favorites. Because everything's stored on the WebTV Network, you never have to worry about losing all of your important information if you have a power outage or any other problem with your terminal. In fact, if your terminal is damaged or stolen and you buy a new one, WebTV Networks Customer Care can automatically transfer your "personality" into your new terminal! One future benefit of keeping all of your information up in the Network is that some day you'll be able to access your "personality" wherever you go: kiosks, hotel rooms, or maybe even a friend's house. Won't it be convenient to be able to access your e-mail wherever you are?

I mentioned earlier that the Network gives each terminal more than one phone number to increase the likelihood of connecting. This approach is known as "strength in numbers". We use the same technique to guarantee the quality of the Network for you. There are other servers besides the Preregistration server. For example, there is the Mail server, which sends and receives all of your mail. There is the Setup server, which saves and restores all of your preferences. There is the Home server, which shows you the home page when you power on or hit the home button. And, of course, there are many, many more servers.

There is even a server called the Headwaiter, aptly named because it tells the terminal about all the other servers it needs to talk to and how to reach them over the Internet. But the Headwaiter doesn't just give the terminal access to one server for each type of service (like, say, the Mail server), but to multiple servers. This is done so that if the first server failed then the terminal could just switch over to one of the other servers that provide the same service. This is similar to the situation I described above with phone numbers, and the motivation is the same -- increase the robustness of the Network through redundancy.

Finally, let me conclude by telling you about one more server, which is special because it handles every single web page. This server is called the Proxy server because, from the terminal's point of view, it is a proxy that gets web pages from the Internet for your terminal. The Proxy server does a lot more than that, though. For example, the Proxy server will keep copies of popular pages, so even when there is a traffic jam out on the Internet, it can still deliver many pages quickly. It also speeds up your connection overall, as though you had a powerful network connection into your home rather than a simple phone line. Finally, the Proxy server also screens out unacceptable web sites for younger Club WebTV members on Kid-friendly or Surfwatch^TM-screened accounts.

Odds and Ends
Last month I asked you to send me e-mail if you had an interesting e-mail signature. You can create an automatic signature if you go into the Mail Setup page and type in the words that you would like to appear at the end of each mail message you send.

I was really surprised to learn that a whole bunch of you have figured out how to add formatting, images, animation, and even sound to your signatures using HTML. We originally hadn't planned to support anything but text in the signature, but there was a bug that let HTML sneak in. We liked the results of the bug so much that we've decided to keep it as a feature. Even so, we thought only a few folks would make use of this feature. Apparently there are a lot of you out there who like to express yourselves.

But as creative as some of the signatures were I have to single out the following signature from the Club WebTV member known as Santa Claus:

Old Santa wishes you all a very Merry Christmas

I have to give this fellow credit for sticking with Santa over the summer. Anyone can be solely a cold-weather Santa, but it takes spirit to keep it up in the summer. Don't forget to play the sound file, part of Santa's signature!

Please continue to send me e-mail at philgoldman@webtv.net. Sometimes it takes me a bit of time to get to it but I look forward to reading all of it and, when I can, replying to your messages. See you next month!

-Phil