Rare Bulova Bellcore 20 Years of Service World Mantel Clock. These clocks were given to individuals who had worked for Bellcore for a significant period of time, and since the company name changed only 13 years after their formation, they were specifically for those who had started with the company after their separation from AT&T. Shows the time of countries around the world circling the clock face, with a small plaque in the lower right corner of the front. 

Size: 9 1/4 x 3 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. 

#8417 . 

The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell (as in “Mother Bell”), as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion (equivalent to $440 billion in 2023) and employed over one million people. Beginning in the 1910s, American antitrust regulators had been observing and accusing the Bell System of abusing its monopoly power, and had brought legal action multiple times over the decades. In 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. In 1982, anticipating that it could not win, AT&T agreed to a Justice Department-mandated consent decree that settled the lawsuit and ordered it to break itself up into seven “Regional Bell Operating Companies,” known as “The Baby Bells.” This ended the existence of the conglomerate in 1984. The Baby Bells became independent companies and several of them are large corporations today. One of them, Bellcore, was headquartered in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and handled much of the New York area. The company’s name changed to Telcordia Technologies in 1996, and when they were acquired by Ericsson in 2012 they were restructured and rebranded as iconectiv in 2013. iconectiv supplies communications providers with network planning and management services, and handles cloud-based information in several divisions, including as a service network, for operations management, and fraud prevention. A major architect of the United States telecommunications system, the company pioneered many services, including caller ID, call waiting, mobile number portability, and the toll-free telephone (800) service. It also pioneered the prepaid charging system and the Intelligent Network. It now provides numbering services in more than a dozen countries, including serving as the Local Number Portability Administrator (LNPA) for the United States. In that capacity, iconectiv manages the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC), the system that supports the implementation of local number portability.