Light Reading's editors will not travel to this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

With concerns associated with the spread of the coronavirus growing by the day, and with more and more major companies announcing their withdrawal from the event, we have decided that reporting on the industry's developments will be easier and more efficient without traveling to Barcelona.

While at the time of writing no decision has been made to cancel the whole event, we decided not to wait for the GSMA and/or Spanish authorities to act and have instead taken matters into our own hands. [[NOTE: The GSMA cancelled MWC 2020 at around 2pm EST on Feb 12.) The decision means that our Light Reading group peers from Telecoms.com and Connecting Africa will also no longer attend the event.

As with everyone else that has decided not to attend this year's MWC, we profoundly regret having to make this decision. The event isn't just the industry's commercial focal point of the year, but a significant networking opportunity that fuels the industry in many ways and we look forward to attending next year. In the meantime, we hope these unprecedented events do not hinder ongoing developments in the communications networking and services sector.

For those wishing to share any significant developments and planned major MWC announcements with the Light Reading team, please email us at [email protected] and be sure to include MWC in your email subject line.

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading