Speaking at today’s Meter Up 2025 gathering in San Francisco, CEO Anil Varanasi outlined a sweeping vision for rebuilding enterprise networking from the ground up. With customers and partners spanning schools, labs, warehouses, retail, hospitality, and data centers, he argued that the next defining networking company will emerge in the coming thousand days—and that the industry is at an inflection point where dependence on connectivity is rising while the talent pool of networking engineers is shrinking.
Varanasi said most networking architectures remain fragmented due to decades of acquisitions, leaving enterprises to manage incompatible hardware, software, and operational models. He contrasted that with Meter’s vertically integrated approach, which unifies hardware, firmware, operating systems, software, and operations into a single stack now deployed across some of the world’s most demanding networks. The company is scaling deployments to tens of millions of square feet per week.
A highlight of the keynote was a new partnership with Lumen, enabling customers to purchase Lumen fiber services and Meter’s fully managed network together through unified pricing and visibility—an offer that is live today. Varanasi also previewed upcoming advances in software scale-out, unified OS management across all throughput tiers, and new AI-driven models designed to automate network design, configuration, and management amid a wave of retirements in the networking workforce.
He closed by emphasizing that better networking improves outcomes across society—from productivity in factories to academic performance in schools—and that networking must once again become a domain where companies build, rather than assemble, critical infrastructure.
Key Themes
- Networking has stalled: innovation slowed as large vendors stitched together acquired products.
- A declining talent pool: ~25% of network engineers are retiring by 2030.
- A unified stack: Meter now runs a single hardware–software–operations platform across all customers.
- Lumen partnership: integrated ISP + LAN offering available immediately.
- AI-driven autonomy: new models to design, configure, and manage networks.
- ISP + LAN converge: Meter Connect and Meter Cellular extend the stack end-to-end.
- Long-term ambition: unify everything from 1 Gbps to multi-terabit networks under one OS and one dashboard.
Quote of the Day — Anil Varanasi
“Networking should be built, not bought—and if we get networking right, all of compute gets better.”
Meter Inc., headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2015 by brothers Anil and Sunil Varanasi, provides a full-stack, utility-like approach to enterprise networking by integrating its own switches, access points, security appliances, and software into a managed service that delivers wired, wireless, and internet infrastructure. The company’s platform incorporates AI/ML models trained on large operational datasets to automate tasks such as failover, wireless optimization, and troubleshooting.
