The New England Telephone and Telegraph Company was the first company set up to develop the then-new telephone. It was formed February 12, 1878 by investors in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island at the behest of an agent of Gardiner Hubbard , the father-in-law of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
That company had no direct relationship to the later New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, which is now part of Verizon.