UPDATE: Voting is now over. Click here for the results.
The results are in, and now it’s time to move on to round two.
In past years, Fierce has published a list of who we think are the most powerful people in the U.S. telecom industry. But this year we’re letting you decide. Every day this week we’re going to run a new round of voting in a tournament-style bracket, and by Monday we’ll announce the winner. Click here for the results from the first round.
We’re using Polldaddy.com for the actual voting, and repeated voting is prohibited with a block to cookies and IP addresses. (For you sports fans out there, the seedings are mostly random and don't indicate favorites; we were more interested in creating exciting matchups.)
The second-round bracket is below, and below that are the actual matchups that you can vote on (polls on this round close at 11 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday Dec. 14).
The results from the first round contained a number of interesting and surprising outcomes. Most notably, the CEOs of the nation’s largest telco and wireless carriers – Verizon’s Lowell McAdam and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson – both lost by wide margins. There were a few tight races: Samsung’s Dongjin Koh outpaced Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf by just a few votes, as did Zayo's Dan Caruso over CenturyLink's Glen Post. And though the FCC's Ajit Pai was leading against CTIA's Meredith Attwell Baker for most of the duration of the first round, Baker ended up winning.
The poll that received the most votes though was the matchup between T-Mobile’s John Legere and Sprint’s Marcelo Claure. Both executives tweeted about the vote, and Legere likely won because of his 3.3 million Twitter followers.
We hope you enjoy this feature, and we hope you tune in tomorrow to find out who’s moving on and who’s not. – Mike | @mikeddano
Article updated Dec. 14 to correct the day that the final winner will be published.