Enter now: The 2022 Light Reading Leading Lights awards

The Leading Lights, Light Reading's flagship awards program, is back again and open for entries. We're all set and ready to recognize the industry's top companies and their executives for communications industry achievements.

The Leading Lights spans a wide variety of categories highlighting the remarkable companies, products, technology use cases and individual contributions to the communications industry. Here are three important links you need to have for the Leading Lights awards:

Each year we try to change things up a little so that the program doesn't get stale and so that it does a decent job of reflecting the depth and breadth of the industry we cover. This year, we've got a couple of new wrinkles to tell you about.

Figure 1:

MVPs

One significant change is that we're looking for Light Reading MVPs – not just one person of the year. We're looking for individuals, at any corporate level, who made an unmistakable difference in their company, in their community, and/or in the culture in the past 12 to 18 months. In the past, we've only awarded one person of the year, but we heard several excellent stories about remarkable people working in the communications industry. We look forward to honoring more MVPs and doing a better job of covering their accomplishments.

The Editor's Choice

Another big change: Our editors have more awards to give away. In 2022, our editors have been given the ability to hand out additional awards in some closely contested categories, at their discretion. The Editor's Choice Leading Lights will be announced when we make the Leading Lights winners announcements in November. Even if you aren't a clear category winner, if you've made an extraordinarily compelling case to our judges, you may not go home empty-handed.

Timing matters

We will stop taking accepting entries on Tuesday, September 13. Once our entry system is locked down, 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 of finalists will be announced on Monday, October 3, 2022.

Next, we bring in more judges to help us vet the finalists. We assemble a panel of industry experts that are assigned to just a couple of categories, and they help us through the most difficult part of all – picking a winner out of each category's best and brightest.

The Leading Lights Winners will be announced via a live online video presentation in November. We'll announce the specific date this fall.

We're excited to be bringing back the Leading Lights for its 18th year. We couldn't do this without you and the next step in this process is all up to you. Please visit our Leading Lights awards page today, check out the categories, the descriptions and the FAQ, and get ready to enter the Leading Lights.

Who wins?

The short answer: Any company that shows leadership in the telecom sector stands a good chance of winning. We adjust categories and the number of awards each year to make sure that startups and industry giants are on as level a playing field as possible. Yes, we know that we're applying a multi-layered numeric judging process to a subjective evaluation of companies and, yes, we know we're comparing apples to oranges in some categories. We hope those acknowledged imperfections make the awards fairer, even if they can't be totally objective.

In the meantime, to address the question of what kinds of companies win a Leading Lights Award, please have a look back at the last decade of winners:

Get your entries in soon and good luck!

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