I call BS on any survey or programmer that considers HTML a programming language.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." --Western Union internal memo, 1876

Lots of folks have rightly pointed out that the electronics for cellular telephones wasn't ready in 1947 but neither was the switching infrastructure. The first customer-dialed long distance telephone call wasn't placed until 1951 and it took at least the better part of a decade for that technology to be widely available across the US. Telephone switching was largely electromechanical until the early 1970s with the first Electronic Switching System having been deployed in 1965. But even at that time, the #1 ESS didn't have the sophistication or compute power to keep track of phones and perform handoffs as they moved from cell to cell. (The first true cell phone networks were built on the 1A ESS that came over 10 years later.) Having said that, AT&T did demonstrate the cellular concept with a pay phone service on the Metroliner train service between New York City and Washington DC in the late 1960s. The pay phones used land mobile radio channels and would switch from channel to channel with a reuse pattern up and down the Northeast Corridor. There was a lot of work that had to be done and technology that had to be developed to get to that point - it took them a good 20 years to build this proof of concept, which they did prior to the FCC allocating what ultimately would become cellular spectrum. In fact, the Metroliner payphone system was a key milestone in opening up the conversation to get UHF TV channels 70-83 allocated for cellular. TFA would have been more accurate if it had focused on 1970s as lost time for cellular development, but I think it was only a marginal effect. Much of the technology was still being developed (like Marty Cooper's handheld cell phone) while the lawyers and lobbyists haggled over the spectrum. By the point, it was pretty clear cellular was going to happen, it was just the regulatory details that had to be worked out.

Yeah, and those would be the same monkeys that might fly out of my butt!

There are several examples of government agencies running their own networks between labs or facilities spread out nationally. The Deparatment of Energy is the first one that comes to mind. The NSF also has experience with this. There are also a lot of regional optical networks at major cities which could be used to help get to where you want to go instead of costly custom last mile solutions from your network vendor of choice.

It might be beneficial for you to
a) See if an umbrella agency has a national net you can leverage.
b) Talk to DOE (ESnet), NLR, Internet2 (Abilene) and get some information that could help you do this more cheaply than going to Qwest and having them price the whole party.