Broadband Breakfast to Mark America250 With Telecom150, a Series on American Telecom
Online event series runs June 17, June 24, and July 1, tracing American communications from Bell's first telephone call to the age of artificial intelligence.
WASHINGTON, June 4, 2026 – Broadband Breakfast is hosting a three-part live online event series this summer, 250 Years of American Independence, 150 Years of American Telecommunications, covering 150 years of American communications history from Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone call to the age of artificial intelligence.
Drew Clark
In addition to marking 250 years of American independence, the year 2026 also marks 150 years since Bell made the first telephone call on March 7, 1876. That moment that set American telecommunications in motion.
The online series runs Wednesday at 12 Noon ET on June 17, June 24, and July 1, 2026.
Each event covers a distinct 50-year arc of American communications history. The first and third sessions will be moderated by Drew Clark, CEO and Publisher of Broadband Breakfast; the second session will be moderated by Ted Hearn, Managing Editor of Broadband Breakfast and Editor of Policyband.
Each of the three sessions will gather historians, technologists and prominent experts relevant to each period.
The three sessions are:
June 17: 1876–1926, The Telephone and the Transatlantic Cable
The first session covers the half-century from Alexander Graham Bell's patent and the founding of Bell Telephone through the rise of AT&T, the buildout of nationwide copper networks, and the completion of the first transcontinental telephone line in 1914.
Submarine and overland cables connected commerce, government, and family life at unprecedented speed, laying the physical and regulatory groundwork for everything that followed. The panel will examine how the policy debates, monopoly questions, and infrastructure investments of this period continue to shape today's broadband landscape.
Confirmed panelists include Claude S. Fischer, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, and Menahem Blondheim, Professor of Communication and History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897.
Broadband Breakfast
June 24: 1927–1976, Broadcasting, Cable and the Creation of the Media
The second session opens with the founding of NBC in 1926 and the creation of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927. It then traces the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, the postwar television boom, the landmark 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, the emergence of PBS, and cable systems that began challenging the big three broadcast networks.
Along the way, regulators wrestled with spectrum allocation, public interest obligations, the Fairness Doctrine, and the tension between broadcast scarcity and the First Amendment.
Broadband Breakfast
July 1: 1977–2026, Computing, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence
The third session opens with the breakup of Ma Bell and traces the transition from ARPANET to the commercial internet, the World Wide Web, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the dot-com era, the rise of broadband and big tech, net neutrality battles, the smartphone revolution, and the explosion of large language models in the ChatGPT era.
The panel will examine what this fast-paced half-century tells us about innovation cycles, regulatory lag, and the next 150 years of American telecommunications.
Confirmed panelists include Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that underpin the modern internet.
Broadband Breakfast
Broadband Breakfast has invited additional historians, practitioners, and esteemed officials specializing in telecommunications, media policy, and American institutional history to participate in the panels.
About Broadband Breakfast
Broadband Breakfast reports every day on America's broadband buildout, and is the community for Better Broadband, Better Lives. The community tracks the development of broadband infrastructure, investment and impact. The company’s annual Digital Infrastructure Investment Summit champions a robust 21st century information economy.
For media inquiries, sponsorship opportunities, or event registration, please contact Sales & Marketing Director Quinn Nghiem at quinn@breakfast.media, Community Manager Ari Bertenthal at ari@breakfast.media, or Development Associate Akul Saxena at akul@breakfast.media.
