Small Cell Forum Chair, Alan Law, has been invited to take part in a main GSMA conference panel discussion on the licence-exempt spectrum issue at this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The session is called “Network Diversity: LTE-U and Beyond” and Alan – who also leads the Forum’s Licence-Exempt work item – is joined on the panel by experts from Intel and Qualcomm as well as the CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Describing the session, the GSMA says the development of LTE-U provides “mobile operators with a compelling solution to address congestion within their licensed spectrum bands while also providing a superior user experience to Wi-Fi in the unlicensed bands.”

But they also add that questions remain over the viability of running both Wi-Fi and LTE-U within the same bands, and that concerns have been raised on the potential impact LTE-U deployments might have on existing and future Wi-Fi deployments.

Ahead of the conference Alan Law said: “The end goal for all operators is to deliver the best sustainable service they can to their customers. To do this, every operator is looking at a network modernization and transformation program that will involve the use of licence-exempt spectrum.

“The best network performance gains, with the minimum of interference, will be achieved by having fully-integrated small cells capable of understanding of the network environment and all of the available spectrum resources.  I’ll be making that case strongly in Barcelona, and the work we have already delivered in this space shows just how well qualified we are to lead the market,” he added.

Small Cell Forum will host the Small Cell Zone in Hall 7, Stand F61.