For several years FierceWireless has published our signature “Most Powerful People” contest, where we pit top wireless executives against each other in a March Madness-style voting bracket. It’s a fun, community building feature to get employees at top companies in the wireless ecosystem to rally around their leaders.
In 2020, we’re taking a different twist on the contest — we’re pitting wireless operators against wireless vendors.
Today is the first day of our 2020 contest. Please see the tournament-style bracket below for all the contestants. And below the bracket, you’ll see the voting polls.
We’re going to leave these polls up until 8 am ET on Monday, December, 7. Then we’ll take those results and move onto the next bracket.
On December 7 and for the following four days, we’ll run a new round of voting, starting at around 8 am ET each morning. On Friday of next week, we’ll announce the winner.
We’re using CrowdSignal for the actual voting. Just click on the contestant you want, then click “vote.” To prevent repeated voting from a device, we’ve enabled CrowdSignal’s security measures with a block to cookies and IP addresses. But, we ask all voters to please play fair and only vote once in each of the separate polls. [There’s no money award here, folks. It’s all in good fun].
Below the bracket and the poll matchups you’ll find the full list of candidates.
For those of you keeping score, this is an annual feature that we publish at the end of each year. In 2018 the winner was Sprint’s Michel Combes, and in 2019 we focused on the most powerful person in wireless technology, and the winner was Rakuten Mobile’s Tareq Amin.
To be clear: FierceWireless’ editorial staff assembled this 2020 list through internal deliberations only. These are the 24 people we believe can legitimately lay claim to being the most powerful person in the U.S. wireless industry.
The 2020 winner is up to you, dear readers.
We hope you enjoy this feature, and let the voting begin!
Then tune back in on Monday morning to find out who’s moving on and who’s not.
– Linda @lindahardesty
These were all the candidates in this tournament:
Bob Swan is CEO of Intel, a chip maker that’s important to both the wireless and wired telecommunications industry.
Shuky Sheffer is CEO of Amdocs, a company whose back-office technology is found in the majority of global carriers.
As CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins guides the strategy of one of the world’s largest vendors for wireline and wireless equipment.
Pardeep Kohli is CEO at Mavenir, a company working on virtualization technology for service providers.
As the new CEO of CommScope, Charles Treadway oversees the company’s complete wireless and wired businesses.
Patrick Gelsinger is CEO of VMware, a company whose virtual machine and container technology is instrumental in networks.
Iyad Tarazi is CEO at Federated Wireless, a company that is leading the industry in development of shared spectrum CBRS capabilities.
Preston Marshall is technical program manager at Google, where he has been one of the leaders in developing spectrum sharing rules for CBRS.
Pekka Lundmark recently took over as CEO of Nokia, one of the top three telecommunications vendors in the world.
As CEO of Ericsson, Borje Ekholm is leading the telecommunications vendor through the transition to 5G.
Mark Louison, general manager of the networks division at Samsung Electronics America, is helping the South Korean vendor expand its global presence in teleco network infrastructure.
Cristiano Amon serves as president of Qualcomm, where he is responsible for the oversight of all activities related to the company’s semiconductor business.
Marc Rouanne is chief network officer at Dish Network, overseeing the strategy and architecture of the company’s new wireless network, including its core, cloud and edge.
Enrique Blanco is CTO and chief information officer at Telefónica, a global service provider with fixed and wireless operations.
Tareq Amin is CTO at Rakuten Mobile where he led the charge to build a greenfield 4G/5G network in Japan.
Anne Chow is CEO of AT&T Business, the unit that serves enterprise customers.
As CEO of Verizon Business Group, Tami Erwin oversees the carrier’s enterprise business.
Michael Trabbia is CTO and innovation officer at Orange where he oversees the technology for the operator and seizes opportunities via new technologies.
Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone Group’s head of network strategy and architecture, is a leading proponent of open RAN.
Neville Ray is president of technology at T-Mobile where he’s leading the carrier’s 5G strategy.
Mike Sievert is the CEO of T-Mobile, which has gained prominence over the last several years.
Hans Vestberg is CEO of Verizon, where he oversees the nation’s largest wireless network operator in terms of customers.
John Stankey is CEO of AT&T where he’s in charge of a variety of businesses for the carrier, including wireless, wired and media.
Charlie Ergen, is co-founder and chairman of the board for Dish Network, a company that’s building the fourth largest infrastructure-based wireless network in the U.S.
