The coronavirus pandemic is more than a year old and, here in the US, where COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in 2020, the vaccination outlook has improved drastically in recent weeks.

Against that backdrop, when will business travel start to feel like business as usual?

Figure 1:

We've been tracking the vendor and service provider travel decisions and outspoken new exhibitors emerging at MWC Barcelona, the communications industry's de facto global meeting place.

There's a definite building buzz around a public cloud evangelist and her crop of industry disruptors.

But the webscale giants themselves won't be on hand to soak up the adulation. It has been widely reported this week that Google is backing out of MWC. Light Reading sources have confirmed that Microsoft is also staying away.

On the silicon giants front, Intel has revealed that it's not going.

Since the messages are increasingly mixed, and we still have 87 days before the show starts, we thought we'd ask our audience what they think they'll be doing in late June, given what they know at the moment.

Please take our five-question survey about MWC plans and we'll share what we find out in a few days. We know the situation is changing all the time and we'll likely run this survey again in a few weeks to see how things evolve.

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