More than 47,000 votes were cast, and the winner is OneWeb’s Greg Wyler.
Last week, FierceWireless published “Executives to watch: 11 rising stars of wireless.” It listed the top executives the FierceWireless editorial team considers on the rise in the industry. The list included executives from some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers as well as those from top vendors and leading industry associations.
But it was a relative outlier—an entrepreneur from a startup hoping to deploy internet services from space—who ended up winning the vote. Greg Wyler founded OneWeb in 2012, which has since raised almost $2 billion in funding from the likes of Qualcomm, Bharti, Coca-Cola, Hughes, Virgin Group and Japan’s SoftBank. The company hopes to eventually offer internet services in the 12 GHz to 18 GHz band to up to 1 billion subscribers worldwide via roughly 600 low-Earth satellites beaming download speeds of up to 200 Mbps, upload speeds of up to 50 Mbps and lower latency than existing services.
Wyler managed to collect almost 8,000 votes during the past week, just outpacing the 7,000 votes collected by T-Mobile’s Jon Freier and the 5,000 votes collected by Qualcomm’s Durga Malladi, who came in third.
Here are the full results:
For those of you who voted, thanks so much for participating. And congratulations again to all of our Rising Stars. – Mike | @mikeddano