TLDR; Keep your eye on Meter, a Network-as-a-Service company with a vision so far in the future that it seems nearly impossible, yet they are actively delivering that vision today. White glove full network delivery, intuitive generative AI dashboard building, Neutral Host CBRS, simple billing, the list goes on.
Daunting, Admirable, Insane, Incredible
These are the words that came to mind as the day progressed at Meter’s first annual conference held last week in San Francisco. It was a 1-day event packed with insightful presentations, and captivating guest speakers like former Global VP of Engineering at Facebook, Jay Parikh, and co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, Michelle Zatlyn. I got the sense that Meter is truly doing something groundbreaking, and the industry is watching, curious how they keep going after lofty goals and actually delivering on it. It’s rare to get excited about things in the network space, but I’m honestly impressed with what they’ve set out to do.
Who is Meter?
Meter is a lot of things – a network hardware manufacturer – a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider – an ISP circuit manager and aggregator – a network operator. Meter is defining what it means to deliver a network seamlessly as a service that is reliable, performant, secure, and sustainable. It’s hard to comprehend how they do it all, but it’s impressive and I commend them. Let’s break it down a bit.
Meter owns and manages the entire process of network delivery..
- Ordering, installing and consolidating billing for circuits
- Project management
- Network design
- Hardware installation
- Cabling
- Network Operations
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- Software Upgrades and patching
- Hardware replacement and upgrades
- And more
They charge a monthly fee, priced per square foot, all inclusive.
From a hardware perspective, Meter develops and builds all of the hardware in house, including switches, wireless access points, security appliances, and PDUs. Branding is super clean, echoing Apple vibes. And because they own the full stack and develop as a single team, they claim they’re able to optimize performance and scale significantly beyond their competitors.
From a software perspective, they’ve developed an in-house Network Operating System (NOS). This is a unified image, the same NOS that runs on all of their platforms, single ecosystem, single codebase, simple. Their software development lifecycle and QA process is impressive. All code goes through rigorous testing. Each employee has a meter network at home, they test that and meter offices prior to any single customer deployment. Eating their own dog food. The whole philosophy behind their software dev reminded me of that infamous overview that Arista’s founder Ken Duda gave at Tech Field Day about culture of quality.
Everything is controlled from their cloud-based platform. The dashboard is clean, reminiscent of Meraki. I believe there are quite a few former Meraki employees at Meter. 👀
What else is compelling?
A few things…
Meter essentially has a native digital twin due to the way they build networks. All networks are designed and built virtually before ever installing a piece of hardware. Once the hardware comes online, it knows exactly what configuration it should be in and how it should operate. The way I understand it is someone at Meter designs the network, which the gets sent over to a delivery team that virtually builds the network and associates each hardware device so that when it’s shipped (sometimes same day) – and plugged in, the device configured itself exactly as the digital twin.
An application called Command is available in the dashboard which is a natural language “command line” interface based on AI models trained in-house. No commands to memorize, just ask the platform what you’re looking for and it will tell you, not only that, but you can then drag the visual outputs to a canvas to create custom dashboards on the fly – and those dashboards will update dynamically! 🤯 Many examples on their site, here is one:
Meter just announced CBRS-based neutral host networking, called Meter Cellular, all within the same platform, to deliver mobile network operator networks into areas with poor cellular coverage. Prior to neutral host network, usually the only option was an expensive, timely, and ugly distributed antenna system. Meter is taking an entirely different approach, extending cellular coverage with attractive devices at a fraction of the cost and just as simple to install as an access point. This to me is hugely compelling for customers. They took inspiration from Meta’s recent approach to neutral host in their campus buildings, which a few of my Deloitte colleagues were involved with alongside leading cell providers. Small world.
Meter has a free service that aggregates all available ISP circuit options for any address. It’s extremely helpful for determining options in an area. As a customer, you can also use this service to sign up for internet service and consolidated billing. Meter will even pay on your behalf and give you a single monthly bill for all of your circuits.
Two primary KPIs they use to measure success is downtime, and time spent with the customer. Downtime makes sense, but the other metric is new to me, and it goes to show why they’ve spent so much time building the dependencies and ancillary workflows into the offering. The customer literally doesn’t need to think about the network if they don’t want to.
What’s the catch?
Large complex organizations will be last to adopt NaaS. Although Meter started out focusing on small clients, they’ve recently been growing their logos of larger clients, such as Higher Ground Education which has 200+ Montessori schools across the nation. Still, as they start taking on large-sized clients, they’ll have some obstacles ahead when it comes to zero trust and environments that have unique connectivity requirements. I think they’ll get there and we’ll see a lot more logos that show they can take on even the most challenging customers.
Simplification of the network is vital for NaaS to be effective. The network cannot be expected to solve every problem. Modernizing applications and reframing security controls are important conversations that can be challenging for some organizations that have traditionally relied on the network to handle more than it was intended to.
Contractual complexity may be one of the biggest obstacles. Writing an outcome-based contract is difficult, especially in large organizations. However, it’s quite common and should not be thought of as a blocker.
Closing Thoughts
With ISP, Wired, WiFi, and Cell all in a single platform, delivered as a service, Meter stands out and continues to surprise us about the future of networking.
For those aspiring for outcome-based networking to the point where you do not think about the network, Meter is worth considering. Speaking with some of their customers, there is a sense of liberation from network engineering, pivoting focus to other business growth areas like GenAI instead of worrying about infrastructure.
Network-as-a-Service is simultaneously something that worries me and excites me. I absolutely see the business value, the simplicity, and the predictability. I also see my job incrementally getting automated by advancements in AI and NaaS. Refreshingly, Meter is a NaaS company that is bringing network professionals along the journey with them. I’m here for it.
