A look inside MeterUp 2024

Published: October 11, 2024

Meter team

We recently welcomed IT and networking experts, industry analysts, and tech leaders to our first-ever conference, MeterUp. It was a day dedicated to bringing our community closer together, pulling back the curtain on Meter, and getting expert feedback on our products and services.

We provided this group a first-hand look at what we’ve been busy building and are actively deploying today — an end-to-end networking solution, built from the ground up. From ISP procurement to Wi-Fi, and now cellular coverage, we’ve designed a complete connectivity experience that’s fast, secure, reliable, and available for any enterprise space.

“If there is a packet moving in the world, we want it to go through Meter hardware and software.”

Anil Varanasi

Co-founder & CEO, Meter

Read on for a recap of the major announcements, discussions, and themes from the event. All MeterUp sessions are now available to watch on demand.

Hardware + software + operations = great outcomes

Everything we build at Meter starts with customer outcomes in mind. Because we are responsible for the full networking stack, our success is dependent on providing our customers with a great and reliable network. Before heading over to our QA Lab and Warehouse to physically touch and test Meter hardware, Meter CTO Sunil Varanasi guided the MeterUp guests through our full stack architecture. This provided a brief yet detailed look into our data, control, and management planes, the products that sit on top, and how everything is designed to work together across one, superior networking stack. Underpinning the full stack — and Meter's true differentiator is the Network Operating System (NOS), which allows us to continuously deliver new software features and purpose-built hardware.

MeterUp 2024: Meter Technical Architecture Overview

“With this infrastructure, we can scale to hundreds of thousands of networks, with hundreds of thousands of devices on those networks.”

Sunil Varanasi

Co-founder & CTO, Meter

Digging into the products and services we provide on top of our technical architecture, Sean Rose, who leads product for us, shared why every detail matters when building internet infrastructure for the long term:

“The issue with how things are done currently is that if you start to look at [networking] components categorically in terms of this piece of hardware, that software, this version, this installer's job — it becomes only natural to begin ignoring how all those things combined together and ultimately form that simple customer experience that we're striving to deliver … We take the responsibility to master each of those details.”

Sean Rose

Product, Meter

The morning’s keynote session wrapped up with Meter announcements, beginning with next-generation hardware coming this spring—all designed with purpose, utility, and uniformity in mind. “Come May 2025, we'll be launching a new, vertically integrated networking stack,” said Joshua Markell, who leads Hardware for Meter. “We're going to focus on the hardware brand, the individual product performance, the network efficiencies, and the network verticality,” he added. We also announced Cellular: high quality, cost-effective cell connectivity for any space that will be available to customers in January 2025. If a site can have Wi-Fi installed, it can have Cellular installed, all at a fraction of the cost and installation time.

And finally, we gave greater insight into two products already delivering significant value to our customers: Connect and Command. Both products were demoed live on stage to showcase their efficiency and utility — Connect, for enabling users to compare quotes and get set up with an internet service provider (ISP) in just a few clicks; and Command, for generating custom software on-the-fly, giving Meter users greater control and visibility into their networks.

Building a kind and ambitious community

We opened our doors to a select group of networking professionals, operators, and analysts—many of whom have been an integral part of our journey over the last decade, providing feedback and support along the way. “One of my biggest requests for the day is don't hold back on feedback,” said Anil. “Break everything — everything you see in our labs, everything you see in our demos, please ask us questions and push us. It's the best way for us to get better.” It was incredibly special to see this community come together at MeterUp for deep discussions, insightful feedback, and community building.

We were also fortunate to have an expert lineup of external speakers bring their unique perspectives to the MeterUp stage. From panel discussions on the core requirements for building and managing a reliable network today to the future of network engineering, speakers from tech companies, universities, financial institutions, and analyst groups shared their insights with our audience.

“The key [to getting started in network engineering today] is to stay inquisitive, stay innovative, and just get involved.”“There's a wealth of information that's out there … I think that part of the next generation of tools that will be useful are the ones that actually make your life easier. There's a couple other workflow automation processing tools that have things that help people work faster and smarter. Those are the things that actually are interesting.”

Nick Fohs

Senior Manager, Corporate Technology Systems & Infrastructure

Jay Parikh led engineering and infrastructure during the early days of Facebook. As we build out Meter’s infrastructure for the long term, we were eager to get Jay’s thoughts on building for speed and scale.

“To see even the evolution of [Meter] hardware, to see things like Command, and your own evolution in terms of how you're thinking about the business and what the problems are that you can solve, the scale at which you can solve them … you wouldn't be able to get there if you did not take a systems approach to the hardware, the firmware, the software, the UI, the APIs.”“It’s really fun to see the pace at which this stuff is getting disruptive … We've never experienced this rate of creative destruction as we are right now.”

Jay Parikh

Board member, AtlassianFormer CEO, LaceworkFormer Global VP of Engineering, Facebook

Michelle Zatlyn, Cofounder and President of CloudFlare, a global leader in network performance and security, knows cybersecurity better than anyone. She shared why having an adaptive security strategy today is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Michelle Zatlyn

Co-founder, COO, President

The last networking company

We feel incredibly fortunate that customers trust us with something as critical to their businesses as their networks. We’ve invested heavily to ensure that Meter hardware, software, and operations are delivered as a single, unified product that provides incredible value to our end users, because delivering the best possible networks to our customers and partners is not just an opportunity but an obligation.

“We're certainly not the first networking company, by any measure, but with all of your help, we want Meter to be the last networking company you’ll ever need.”

Anil Varanasi

Co-founder & CEO, Meter

We worked hard to bring our guests along for an experience that felt uniquely Meter, and we’re so grateful to everyone who made the time to spend the day with us. We can’t wait to host you next year!

All MeterUp sessions are now available to watch on demand.

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