Today is the last day to enter the Leading Lights Awards at the early bird price.
The Leading Lights Awards have been recognizing the best work in the communications industry since 2004, and if you’ve been thinking about entering the 2026 program, today is the day to stop thinking about it. Early bird entries close at the end of the day. The final deadline is June 26, but entering now costs a little less, so there’s a practical reason not to wait.
New categories
This year’s program expanded from 20 to 30 categories, and the additions track where the industry’s attention actually is right now. Agentic AI gets its own category for the first time, because autonomous agents operating across communications networks stopped being a hypothetical sometime in the last 18 months. Satellite and non-terrestrial networks get their own slot, too, reflecting a direct-to-device market that is constantly in our headlines this year. Telecom security is back as a standalone category, and optical networking has been split into components and systems because the market is too active and moving too quickly to be treated as a single story.
On the use case side, eight new categories cover high-capacity transport, network API monetization, energy efficiency and network modernization, among others. If your company has a deployment story worth telling, there’s almost certainly a place to put it.
Every entry is judged on its merits by Light Reading’s editorial team and a curated panel of independent journalists, analysts and industry experts. There’s no shortcut to winning, but there’s also no event booth purchase or conference sponsorship required to qualify.
Finalists will be announced on July 22. Winners are revealed on September 9.