Enterprises pay carriers a monthly fee to connect their branch offices to the internet. Meter is betting they will buy the network inside the building the same way. Meter owns the switches, firewalls and wireless access points and charges a monthly rate based on the floor space the network serves.
Under its network as a service (NaaS) model, Meter designs the local network and rolls out firmware updates across customer sites. Customers still set their own access policies. An engineer can put guest Wi-Fi on a separate VLAN or change a firewall rule in the dashboard.
How a Meter Network Is Built
At a typical site, a Meter firewall connects the local network to the internet. Core and access switches carry traffic to wired devices and wireless access points. Meter also supplies managed power distribution units and an optional G1 cellular gateway for a backup WAN connection. Its separate in-building cellular service extends carrier coverage to phones indoors.
Meter introduced its S1 access switch on November 18, 2025. It has 24 access ports supporting 2.5GbE, six 25GbE uplinks and a shared 720-watt Power over Ethernet budget. Allocating the maximum 60 watts to each of 12 ports would exhaust that budget. An engineer investigating an offline access point can check its switch port and power draw alongside its wireless status.
User traffic does not pass through Meter Cloud. If the management connection drops, a wireless client can still reach a local file server, provided services such as authentication and name resolution remain available. Losing the only internet circuit would still cut off access to cloud applications.
A company can put a branch on Meter and keep its existing core. For a standard site-to-site connection to a third-party firewall, Meter documents a policy-based IPsec tunnel. The remote firewall must use a policy-based tunnel too.
Long lead times can force customers to look for alternate models, vendors, or a different deployment approach altogether. Estimates for infrastructure hardware can range from 20 weeks to more than 50, and in our experience, many vendors give hyperscalers and neoclouds priority. Alternative hardware still has to meet the original design requirements. In its second-quarter 2026 filing, Arista said it had increased purchase commitments as AI network deployments accelerated and supplies of memory and silicon tightened. Meter manages component sourcing to help shorten delivery times.
Network Policy and Firmware Updates
An administrator can use the Meter Dashboard to configure wireless access, VLANs, routing and firewall policies across sites. A laptop may fail to authenticate, or it may join the Wi-Fi but never receive an IP address. Meter provides separate alerts for an unreachable RADIUS server and for DHCP failures.
We spoke with Meter about how it is expanding its use of AI in network operations. The company says its support engineers use Command to analyze live telemetry when they investigate a fault. In the customer dashboard, an engineer can ask Command to show a client’s network activity. If the engineer asks it to enable a switch port, Command prepares the change for confirmation.
In our experience building AI tools for multivendor networks, getting the command syntax right was only part of the work. A switch can report a port as enabled even when the physical link is down. We had to test which command to run and which field to trust on each operating system. This is where I think a single stack helps Meter: its engineers control both the software reporting the link state and the interface Command uses to read it.
Even a command meant only to inspect a device can cause trouble. Juniper documented a bug in which a particular show command could crash the routing process on affected releases. We saw a different failure on a Linux server: an AI-generated syntax error running with a minimal harness turned and read-only command into a write action that wiped a configuration file. Luckily, we had a backup and were able to restore services quickly.
Meter maintains the signatures for its intrusion detection and prevention system, which uses the Emerging Threats ruleset. Detect mode logs matching events; Protect mode also blocks the traffic. Administrators can adjust these settings for individual categories or signatures. The customer or its partner investigates the alerts.
Meter tests firmware for its hardware platforms together and ships it as a network operating system (NOS) release, generally every two to three months. It starts with a small group of networks and expands the rollout over several weeks. Within a site, power distribution units and ISP switches normally go first, followed by firewalls, core, distribution and access switches, then wireless access points. Meter waits five to ten minutes between groups so it can halt the upgrade if a problem appears. Updates normally occur within the customer’s maintenance window.
How Customers Use Meter
Logistics company Stord opened seven warehouses across several states. Its IT team wanted to keep shipping through a carrier outage. In an October 2023 case study, Stord’s director of security and IT, Codi Handley, said he wanted a third internet connection if the first two failed. Meter handled site surveys, wired and wireless design, cabling and maintenance.
At Gradient’s coworking facility in Tulsa, the requirement was tenant separation. Companies occupying its 160 offices share infrastructure but need different network access. Meter integrated third-party systems with Gradient’s member registration process, according to a January 2026 case study. Members register through a portal. The network uses 802.1X to authenticate members and assigns their devices to the appropriate company VLAN. Access is revoked automatically when a membership ends.
Crown College in Minnesota already owned its network equipment when it hired Meter to improve indoor cellular coverage. Meter’s October 2026 case study notes that the college had already spent six figures on hardware and licenses. A buyback helped it move the wired and wireless network serving 310,000 square feet of campus space to Meter as well.
What the Subscription Includes
Meter bases its enterprise LAN rate on the area covered, rather than the volume of traffic carried. The price also depends on the scope of work and the contract term. Both Professional and Premium include hardware, software, network design, monitoring, support and maintenance. The main difference is who does the physical work.
| Plan | Initial installation | Replacement equipment |
|---|---|---|
| Professional (Pro in the contract) | The customer arranges installation with its own installer or partner. | The customer arranges installation and configuration. Meter provides remote support. |
| Premium | Meter handles installation and cabling within the approved design. | Meter installs and configures the replacement on site. |
Under Meter’s service agreement, the company aims to ship replacement hardware within one business day. That target is for shipping, not restoration of service. Premium covers cabling from an access switch to a Meter access point in the approved design. Runs to customer cameras or workstations fall outside the standard scope.
Subscriptions renew for one year unless either party gives written notice at least 60 days before expiry. Meter may raise fees at renewal. The annual cap is the greater of 7% or the increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, compounded for each year since the previous term began.
A customer can keep its internet carrier or use Meter Connect to source circuits and coordinate support. Carrier charges may be billed separately, and Meter does not guarantee uptime on those circuits.
Meter’s 99.99% monthly uptime commitment covers access to the web management platform. Customers can claim extra days of service for a qualifying outage. If platform uptime falls below 98% in two consecutive months or in three months within a rolling year, they can terminate instead.
The square-foot rate applies to the enterprise LAN. Meter prices its separate data center offering by power consumption and describes it as serving front-end, storage and management networks. It lists backend networking as still in development.
Where Meter Fits in Enterprise Networks
For a retailer with one IT team supporting dozens of stores, Meter can take over switch and access point updates while the retailer still decides how to separate checkout terminals from guest Wi-Fi. Whether Meter also sends someone to a store to replace a failed switch depends on the plan.
There are also reasons to keep hardware and software separate. A team that qualifies a new switch for the operating system it already runs can keep familiar commands and reuse much of its existing automation. A manufacturer may also need to keep a particular firmware release in production until the next one passes testing on the factory floor. With Meter, the customer sets the maintenance window, but Meter controls the rollout.
About Meter
Brothers Anil and Sunil Varanasi founded Meter in San Francisco in 2015. The company began deploying customer networks in 2019. It described its goal of turning network infrastructure into a utility in its 2022 Series B announcement. Meraki co-founders John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas participated in that $38 million round.
General Catalyst led a $170 million Series C in June 2025, with Microsoft, Sequoia and J.P. Morgan among the investors. Meter reports $255 million in total funding. In March 2026, it acquired WiredScore, which certifies connectivity in commercial buildings.
Disclosure: Hardware Nation is a Meter partner.
Alex Cronin
Alex Cronin is the founder of Hardware Nation and Nanites AI. He is a graduate of Georgia Tech with 20 years of experience in networking and data center infrastructure across enterprises, service providers and hyperscalers. His work spans traditional and open networking, production SONiC deployments, multivendor integration and direct collaboration with manufacturers and engineering teams. Hardware Nation has served organizations including NASA, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, Stanford University and Georgia Tech.
Alex leads engineering teams and contributes directly to architecture, code, integration and evaluation. At Nanites AI, he has led nearly two years of development of an agentic NetOps platform for network troubleshooting. He also develops AI automation for product research and leads business operations at Hardware Nation.
Nanites AI has been cited in Gartner’s Market Guide for Agentic NetOps Software, covered by InformationWeek and discussed by Cisco DevNet. It was selected as one of 12 finalists from more than 400 applicants in the 2025 T Challenge, organized by T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom. Alex has presented his work at Deutsche Telekom in Bonn, CableLabs and Network X Americas.
