LIVE FROM HUAWEI GLOBAL ANALYST SUMMIT 2014: Huawei is intent on becoming the “best partner for carrier customers” as they face a network transformation delivered by technologies such as SDN and NFV, Eric Xu, rotating CEO of the company, said this morning.

But this should not be accompanied by a change of approach from the company, which has seen solid sales growth in recent years. “We should not give away the modest and humble attitude we showed our customers when we were small,” he observed.

Noting that customers are “starting to see the value of NFV and SDN”, the executive said that new concepts and technologies brought about by cloud computing will “restructure networks again in the next 10 years”.

In its works with operators, Huawei noted three focus areas.

“The first mission is to build a ubiquitous network with a faster user experience,” Xu said, noting the significance of Huawei’s “pipe strategy”, intended to deliver “bigger, faster and wider” connections.

Secondly, stating that “people have reached a consensus that telecom operators should be working together with OTT players”, the executive said Huawei will look to help operators leverage user and network assets.

“We want to work with them to build a platform for services,” he continued.

And thirdly, he cited the transformation of operator support platforms to enable more agile operations as a key area of focus, “to meet user requirements faster, in an on-demand and DIY way”.

By “leveraging the best practices of the internet”, operators will be able to improve the service offered to customers, with lower costs through a simplified structure and reduction in staffing costs.

Xu also touched on the concept of 5G, noting that it is not possible to give an exact meaning to the term because “as yet the industry has not used very good language to give a definition of 5G”.

He noted targets such as a 1000x improvement in capacity at the base station, 10Gbit/s user speeds, and reduced latency, for Huawei’s 5G research and development efforts.

In the more immediate future, Xu said that Huawei is working on technologies such as multi-stream aggregation (MSA), delivering faster throughput to users by integrating multiple network types such as WiFi, 3G and LTE.