Honoring women in wireline leadership roles

Sean Buckley, FierceTelecomWomen were once a minority in the male-dominated telecom industry, but over the course of the past few decades that trend has continued to change.

In our fourth annual Women in Wireline feature, FierceTelecom is celebrating those women leaders who are making their mark in the industry through their work developing products and innovations or serving as advocates for specific technologies or service provider groups.

In one area, we highlighted women executives at AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL). The women leaders we cite at these companies are playing instrumental roles in helping to integrate new assets and expanding their networks to serve a host of new IP-enabled services such as IPTV, broadband, and Ethernet for consumers and business customers.  

But we also highlight leaders at other providers: for example, Rachel Hack, Community Manager at Google Fiber (Nasdaq: GOOG) is working to educate communities that it has targeted to deliver its 1 Gbps fiber to the premises (FTTP) services.

No less important are organizations like the Mass Broadband Initiative (MBI) and COMPTEL. Through its efforts, MBI is helping to extend broadband services to underserved and unserved parts of Southern and Western Massachusetts, while COMPTEL continues in its role as an advocate for competitive service providers.

What this all says is the wireline segment of the telecom industry is multi-faceted and women executives are playing a big part in the present and future success.

Please join me in congratulating this year's honorees and let us know of other women executives that we can consider for next year's list.--Sean

Take a look at our new report, Women in Wireline 2013