The Leading Lights, Light Reading's awards program recognizing the industry's top companies and their executives for communications industry achievements, is now open for entries.

The awards program has 26 categories and, for the first time ever, seven of those are related to use cases. Some technology categories involve a lot of moving parts and interdependencies. One way to evaluate those solutions is to see examples of what they can do when deployed. What business opportunities do they unlock? What customer problems do they solve? We can't wait to review those submissions.

To enter the Leading Lights awards competition, please visit http://awards.lightreading.com and follow the links to the entry form. You will have to register for the awards entry site – and that registration is separate from anything else related to Light Reading (i.e., the credentials for your Light Reading user profile won't help). The registration helps us save your entries and allows you to start and stop multiple entries, over several days or weeks, until you're ready to go for the gusto.

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We will stop taking entries on Thursday, July 1. That's when the real fun begins and our editorial staff starts the hard work of evaluating entries, following up with questions and consulting with sources to arrive at a list of finalists. That list, the Leading Lights Shortlist, will be announced at The Big 5G Event in Denver during the week of August 30, 2021.

From that point, once we recover from our night out in Denver, we'll have just a few more weeks to collaborate with our analyst colleagues and come up with the winners list. The Leading Lights Winners will be announced via an online video on October 1, 2021. We've done this in the form of a longish banquet dinner in past years and we think a crisp, carefully edited and irresistibly sharable presentation is the way to go for this year.

We do still want to raise a glass with our industry colleagues and celebrate their achievements. A Leading Lights after-party to honor the contest's finalists and winners will be held during the week of October 26, 2021, to coincide with our editorial staff's tradition of attending and covering MWC Los Angeles.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The first thing that needs to happen is we need to hear from you. Visit our Leading Lights awards page today, check out the categories, the descriptions and the FAQ, and please do consider entering the Leading Lights.

Good luck!

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading