"It's not about price, it's about trust," said Charlie Chen, senior vice president of Huawei Technologies (USA), in an interview at the conference on Thursday. Contracts to build mobile infrastructure for large national carriers are really partnerships that will last 10 years or more, and factors such as performance, reliability, service and vendor road map dominate carriers' decisions, Chen said. Answering a related question, Chen said he doesn't believe Huawei will feel any impact from the controversy over Google's relationship with the Chinese government.

Huawei is winning many of those contracts and has long since evolved beyond its home market of China. It logged US$30 billion in contract sales in 2009, with 70 percent of its revenue coming from outside China. It has contracts, and offices, in more than 100 countries and has 25 percent of its workforce outside the country.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Huawei was the third-largest seller of mobile infrastructure, falling close behind Nokia Siemens Networks after holding the second-place position behind Ericsson, according to research company Dell'Oro Group.

"Huawei sells equipment with comparable technology at half the price ... that's killing prices," Dell'Oro analyst Scott Siegler said earlier this month.

While downplaying the importance of price, Huawei's Chen pointed to the breadth of the company's offerings while also discussing deployments that may put the company at the cutting edge of new developments in mobile broadband.