Chinese telecoms giant Huawei left it late to make its big pre-MWC reveal, but then announced five ‘big initiatives’ that will define its strategy for the rest of this year and beyond.

Big Video is intended to exploit an anticipated $100 billion video industry market, while Big IT will address the $1 trillion enterprise cloud opportunity. Big Operation and Big Architecture refer to infrastructure agility and elasticity, with an eye on virtualization and IoT, while Big Pipe speaks for itself, sort of.

“Digital transformation is a new engine for telecom industry growth, and it will also empower the innovation of other industries.” said William Xu, Executive Director of the Board and Chief Strategy Marketing Officer of Huawei (pictured). “Huawei will continue to open up platform capabilities to help carriers to build an open, collaborative, and win-win industry ecosystem to accelerate digital transformation.”

Huawei has also chosen to focus strongly on ‘4.5G’ ahead of the show, which makes a welcome departure from the 5G spam we will all doubtless be subjected to otherwise. This year is the start of a ‘golden period’ of 4.5G network deployment, with Huawei predicting 60 commercial 4.5G networks rolling out this year alone.

“4.5G is the natural evolution of 4G and necessary transition to the 5G,” said Ryan Ding, Executive Director and President of Products & Solutions ay Huawei Technologies. “It can effectively protect operators’ investments and enable them to provide faster services and better user experience on the basis of existing infrastructures.

“4.5G as defined by Huawei consists of three cores: ‘Gbps’ provides users with instantaneously delivered services; ‘Experience 4.0’ makes HD audios and videos accessible from anywhere; and ‘Connection+’ will open up a new world of ubiquitous connectivity. Based on new terminals, new services and new experiences currently available, 4.5G will deliver a larger bandwidth, shorter time delay and more extensive connections.”