Behind the Scenes of ThoughtWaves

In the Fall of 2024, FBA President and CEO Gary Bolton and I sat down to discuss how the recent record fiber investment cycle of private capex investment and government subsidies has been building toward a generational watershed moment for the country: potentially closing the Digital Equity Gap for all Americans. During our discussion, we realized that this historic moment is actually the intersection of the rise of computing, the internet, and fiber optics and we should capture this moment in a Netflix quality documentary.

It was an ideal and an idea that brought together both parties with a common goal, the democratization of access, ensuring that any home could be connected with the same capacity to thrive. Reliable, high-quality connectivity enables Americans to leverage innovations like AI and Quantum Computing, telehealth to achieve better health outcomes, precision agriculture to build ecosystems that protect the national food supply, and quality educational opportunities with the click of a mouse.

We wanted to find a way to capture this national narrative that looked back at what it took us to get here and looked into the future to what we could become with more connected communities.

The truth we came to during that meeting was that the last three years are just a moment in a fifty-year journey still in the making that will (hopefully) soon lead to our ability to close the digital divide. We wanted to tell that story and, hence, ThoughtWaves was born.

Without the invention of both the internet and fiber optics, without the thousands of hours of engineering and billions of dollars spent on innovation, and without the commitment of tens of thousands of people, closing the digital equity gap would remain out of our grasp. To accurately portray this story, we needed to talk with the people that were there at the beginning, the middle, and to discuss with people much smarter than us what the future might hold.

Jean Armour Polly, a.k.a. Net-mom®, gets set for her ThoughtWaves interview about her work in the early 1990s welcoming nontechnical users to the internet. Source: FBA.

ThoughtWaves is the story of the people, companies and technologies that moved us from that first connection in the mid-1970’s when the first two computers shook hands to the last home connected with fiber broadband.

Partnering with Pilot Moon Films and Islander Entertainment film crews, we captured the story of brilliant minds, innovation, business opportunity, political wrangling and posturing, as well as compromise, challenges, villains and heroes—the story of connecting our world.

When we first set out to tell this story, we didn’t know if any of those brilliant minds or political navigators would be interested in adding their story to ours. They were overwhelmingly interested, in fact. So, we traveled the country, visited rural communities, met the people that made digital connectivity happen.

First, in Washington, D.C., we sat down with people that played an instrumental role in each of three foundational fiber broadband acts: the creation of both fiber broadband and the internet, how each was developed and why, and when the confluence happened that opened doors to today’s digital world and the opportunities it creates.

We heard the stories of internet pioneer and Google Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf; early political evangelists Larry Irving and Laura Breerden; and people who helped move the market forward, like former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Jenna Wandres of GFiber who helped shaped the launch of the Gig City program, Blair Levin who wrote the country’s first National Broadband Policy, and former Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berk who led the charge to reshape his city into a tech Jean Armour Polly, a.k.a. Net-mom®, gets set for her ThoughtWaves interview about her work in the early 1990s welcoming nontechnical users to the internet. Source: FBA. By Rich Williams, Executive Producer BEHIND THE SCENES OF ThoughtWaves Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org 19 hub and the nation’s first Gig City. We also spoke to today’s leaders such as former Capital Projects Director Joseph Wender and Pew Charitable Trusts analyst Kathryn De Wit.

Conversations that first hectic week were insightful, humbling, and cathartic. We knew we had a greater story to tell.

“The whole idea was to unleash innovation. We call that permissionless innovation because you don’t have to go get permission to innovate,” quipped Cerf during a roundtable discussion with Irving and Berk.

Diving deeper, we headed into Virginia to sit down with early telehealth pioneer Dr. Karen Rheuban of UVA Telehealth Institute who shared stories about how connectivity is saving lives and allowing access to communities too far to reach otherwise.

Charlottesville Mayor Juandiego Wade, who’s community has had fiber broadband for over a decade declared that its availability has allowed the rural community to “hit above our weight” in terms of attracting jobs and people who want to escape to the mountain city for a better quality of life.

In New York, we met with the Net-mom®, Jean Amour Polly, who was an early advocate for broadband access in community libraries and authored the first guidebook for parents on web safety. When asked how the notoriety of being the Net Mom has been, she laughed and said it was humbling and an honor, and pretty cool to have been a Final Jeopardy Answer.

We held captivating conversations with Virginia Broadband Office’s Dr. Tamarah Holmes, Corning CTO Claudio Mazzali while touring the Museum of Glass, and Nokia Bell Labs’ president to learn about the company’s role in creating the first fiber access platforms, the decades-long journey to reshape the telecom market, and the beginning of how fiber broadband and the internet would change everything.

We interviewed tribal communities in Colorado, over a dozen network operators, and pioneers and technologists including one of Cisco’s founders Kirk Lougheed. We talked to farmers and innovators in Minnesota, a single mother who leveraged fiber broadband to create a better life for her family, and people trying to create better health outcomes and address loneliness with our growing senior population.

One of the most striking discoveries we found was everyone involved, from those who worked 40-years ago to those working today, who had the same goal: to provide the connections that make us bette

To quote Lougheed, who was there at the beginning of this journey, “first we have to connect everyone and if we don’t connect everyone, we end up with pockets of haves and have nots and that’s really not good for society at all. So, if you want to increase innovation, get more people connected to the network. If you want to lift all boats, get more people connected.”

Since its exclusive preview at Fiber Connect 2025, ThoughtWaves was submitted to several film festivals and already won awards including two Award of Excellence awards from the Impact Doc Festival and an Award of Excellence Special Mention from the Best Shorts Competition.

The selection committee shared, “ThoughtWaves delivers a gripping doc tracing the rise of the internet and fiber broadband. Expertly crafted, meticulously researched, and carefully placed, it spans five decades of innovation, spotlighting visionary pioneers and compelling interviews that show how technology transforms human connection, narrows the digital divide, and shapes our modern world.”

Looking forward, the ThoughtWaves team is working to secure distribution so everyone can enjoy the film. We expect you’ll be able to stream it soon on a reliable, highperformance fiber broadband connection.