- Meter aims to change the way local area networks are built and managed
- During its MeterUp event in San Francisco today, it’s announcing a number of initiatives, including a WAN/LAN collaboration with Lumen
- Meter’s cellular solutions with wireless carriers are basically a DAS replacement
Imagine talking to the CEO of a San Francisco-based communications networking company and the term “AI” isn’t mentioned until 25 minutes into the conversation – and even then, it’s not the firm’s chief executive who first utters the term.
Shocking? Maybe, but having lived through the dot-com bubble that so eerily resembles today’s AI hype cycle, this long-in-the-tooth journalist appreciates it – a lot.
This resistance to plugging AI is all by design, Meter CEO and co-founder Anil Varanasi said via a video call.
“We try not to say buzz words,” he said. “I think the word ‘AI’ gets said so many times in a given meeting that it's lost all meaning at this point. So we try to be very careful on the words we use and what they mean for folks.”
That’s not to say Meter isn’t doing AI. If this were anyone else talking, then yes, “they would be saying AI every five minutes to describe what we’re doing,” he acknowledged.
Meter’s models
Varanasi founded Meter with his brother, Meter Chief Technology Officer Sunil Varanasi, about a decade ago, with the vision of reimagining how networks get built. They wanted local internet and Wi-Fi networks to be as easy to switch on as water or electricity – and just work.
Today, the company designs and builds its own networking hardware – stuff like controllers, switches and wireless access points, with all major manufacturing done in Taiwan. Meter installs the network gear for enterprise customers and uses its software to manage everything.
Meter customers are well-known brands like Lyft, Reddit and Bridgewater, but it’s a broad range: warehouses, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, offices, data centers and schools. Competitors include Palo Alto Networks, Arista Networks, Ericsson’s Cradlepoint, Cisco and Cisco’s Meraki.
As for AI, Meter builds it directly into its network service management platform.
“These are models, trained by us from the ground up, to make network configuration and network management much easier,” Varanasi said.
Big-name backers
The company today is hosting MeterUp, a one-day conference at San Francisco’s Pier 27 that features some big-name speakers, both virtually and in person: Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe and Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson.
That line-up is not necessarily surprising when you consider that Meter’s early investors include OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Earlier this year, Meter struck a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, which participated in Meter’s $170 million Series C financing round in June.
With Lumen, Meter is unveiling a collaboration to deliver a unified wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) solution to enterprise customers, promising a new level of simplicity and lower cost of ownership.
Meter is also introducing more Wi-Fi products, including new access points, as well as an update to Command, a generative user interface that lets IT managers use natural language to communicate with networks. Meter unveiled the first version of Command at its conference last year and expects to deploy a more advanced version in 2027.
Meter’s cellular solution replaces DAS
Besides Wi-Fi access points, Meter offers an indoor cellular solution that’s more affordable than a distributed antenna system (DAS), according to Varanasi. Meter’s 5G gateway aims to keep consumers on wide area wireless networks instead of shifting them to Wi-Fi.
“It is fully cellular,” Varanasi said. “You don’t have to connect to Wi-Fi. You open your phone and your phone directly connects to one of our cellular access points.”
They’re already seeing demand for this at retail stores, educational campuses and even data centers, which are often built in the middle of nowhere but for safety reasons require cellular phone connectivity.
“It’s not easy for carriers to spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions to bring coverage to the middle of nowhere,” he said. “This solves a lot of those problems.”
Making network engineering fun again
Compared to 10 years ago, more network engineers are retiring than entering the job market, and Meter would like to flip that around.
“Today, if you talk to folks who are network engineers, because configuration and design and maintenance are so arduous and so manual, they're actually not getting to do a lot of the engineering,” he said. “They're doing more of the ‘grunt work,’ and this is one of our posits on why fewer people are coming into network engineering.”
Circling back to the use of AI, Fierce asked if the use of AI will, by definition, negate the need for a lot of network engineering jobs.
Varanasi said the situation resembles what happened with compilers. People used to compile code manually, but when computerized compilers started taking on that role, software engineers moved to other tasks.
“We hope, if we’re as wildly successful as it seems like we will be, that more people will come into network engineering because it’s much more fun to work on than it has been in the last decade,” he said.