As the nature of networking comes under renewed consideration, telecom service providers are finding they can’t afford to pretend it’s simply business as usual. For the most forward-thinking of these groups, teaming up with the enterprises that are working to create the very changes challenging the old ways may be the best way to stay in business.

At this year’s Juniper NXTWORK event, Eric Fligel, VP of Network Engineering at WOW! Internet, Cable and Phone, joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. Fligel talked about networking in the world of cable providers and how that situation is changing.

Evolving networks

WOW!, which Fligel described as having “a significant focus on commercial services and growing that commercial space,” has recently been putting more and more focus on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). He agreed with Rami Rahim, CEO at Juniper Networks, Inc., who had been interviewed by theCUBE earlier the same day, that this technology and architecting is where the market seems to be heading.

“It’s taken a lot of work by a dedicated, passionate team on our side. … We have had to go through quite a few speed bumps along the way,” he noted, though he also felt that the use of tools, including Juniper Network’s Contrail service organization, was making progress easier to achieve.

Slimming down

“Right now, the focus is to reduce the equipment on the customer’s [premises],” Fligel said. He added that while WOW! will continue to “have some sort of [demarcation] device [on-prem], the goal is to make the price of that as low as possible.”

He also shared his estimation of networking’s changing nature in the years to come. “I foresee us getting to the point where the network is just a bunch of compute. … It’s just going to become almost commodity compute with the intelligence and the software running on top of it,” he explained.

Handling the ride

Along with the revised nature of networking, other changes are moving into connected spaces. “Cord-cutting is what everyone’s talking about,” Fligel noted. He stated that his cable company sees “moving away from traditional linear video” as an inevitability, one that will only be accelerated by the networking changes. “I think [NFV] is one of the biggest changes, from a network perspective, that we’ve seen in awhile.”

Musing on other parts of the technological shifts, the focus led to Juniper Networks’ role in handling the coming changes. “One reason I’ve been a proponent of Juniper is that … they’ve been leading the way in a lot of cases,” Fligel said. “There have been some points in their history where they’ve maybe lost their way a little bit, but I think they’re finding their way now.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Juniper NXTWORK 2016 event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE