Meter’s approach to enterprise networking could be a game changer for retail, education, and hospitality.
Morgan Cyber Solutions. Reading time: 8 mins
Ever since the inception of packet switching, building IT networks has been defined by complexity, cost, and a large frustrating cast of vendors.
Hardware may be purchased from multiple (say five) different vendors, software from another three. You then bring in a systems integrator to make this all talk to each other while trying to work within each of the vendors’ technical constraints. Finally, ongoing maintenance is handed to a managed service provider, or you try and keep on top of it yourself, 24 / 7 / 365.
While complicated, if you commit enough time and resource, this system will probably work well enough most of the time. After all, you’re probably reading this either in your office or connected remotely via a secure VPN with no issues at all.
However, successful businesses do not over commit resources when they do not need to, and we all know when something breaks, finger-pointing starts. The vendor blames the integrators’ configuration. The integrator blames the vendor, and the MSP blames all the above. Meanwhile, your network is down, and your business is going backwards.
Meter has an ambitious goal; to dismantle this existing model entirely. Their vision is straightforward and radical at the same time: make internet connectivity as simple and reliable as turning on a light or running a tap.
Every building has a power and a water meter. Meter believes internet, networking, and Wi-Fi should be just as seamless and just as easy to switch on and keep on.
Intrigued by this ambition? So were the team at Morgan Cyber Solutions…
So we spent a day with Meter at their ‘Meter in Europe’ launch to find out more.
What quickly became clear is that this is not just a vision. It is a model that is working day in, day out already for hundreds of organisations in the US. Now UK and EU companies looking to secure guaranteed performant, reliable, and secure connectivity for one predictable monthly fee are also able to take advantage.
Building a network from the ground up, not from bundles
The networking market has historically (and largely due to a lack of alternatives) responded to the complexity problem by bundling. Vendors keep purchasing different software and hardware solutions and integrating them together, calling it ‘a solution’. However, the only place they tend to achieve true integration between their products is in their marketing materials.
Meter’s answer is complete vertical integration. The result of six years of R&D, writing operating systems, firmware, and building hardware is a full stack that is entirely its own. Firewalls, switches, Wi-Fi access points, cellular gateways, and power distribution units, all running the same firmware and operating system.
This matters. All the source of truth and intelligence lies in the back end, what Meter calls “desired state networking.” Meter engineers define what the network should do, and the system figures out how to configure the hardware to achieve that state.
When new hardware boots, it pulls its configuration from the cloud, authenticates to the platform, and downloads its role, addressing, VLANs, and policies meaning no pre-configuration is required.
This architecture enables configuration changes to propagate as fast as a Google search. This is not a minor operational improvement. For IT teams juggling dozens of sites and hundreds of devices across multiple vendor platforms, it is transformational.
SLA’s that work for the customer, not to protect the vendor
As any Infrastructure Manager knows, a multi-vendor support call is not a highlight of the working week. You are at the end of the chain, the person who must correlate logs from systems that were never designed to work together and translating between vendors. Accountability is evenly distributed which in practice means nobody truly owns or cares about the outcome… apart from you.
Meter’s vertically integrated approach puts a single company in charge. For the first time the same business that builds the hardware and software is the one designing the network, deploying it, and maintaining it. It also means when a problem occurs, there is no ambiguity about where to look or who to call. The team that built every layer of the stack is the team that will fix it.
Meter is so confident in their service levels that if SLAs are not met consistently, customers can walk away from the agreement. In the US, SLA adherence appears to not be an issue, given Meters’ customer churn is about 0.5%.
This re-alignment of ownership completely and deliberately, changes the commercial dynamic in favour of the customer. In the legacy model, hardware vendors profit from regular refresh cycles encouraging customers to replace equipment on a schedule that suits the vendor’s revenue targets rather than the customer’s actual needs.
By inverting this, Meter retains ownership of the infrastructure and charges on a flat monthly or annual subscription basis. Their incentive is now to make the hardware last and the network to perform, not to push the next generation of kit for its own benefit.
Zero CapEx: Turning infrastructure from an asset into a service
The most commercially significant aspect of the Meter model is what it does to the capital expenditure conversation. Enterprise networking has traditionally required organisations to front significant sums to procure and deploy infrastructure, amortize the investment over several years, and then repeat the cycle.
For businesses managing multiple sites, rapid growth, or constrained balance sheets, this creates tension between balancing network performance and financial discipline.
IT leaders can spend weeks formulating their budget, going through it line by line, and putting a best guess in when it comes to the cost of future upgrades or troubleshooting, where with Meter the consistent price is based solely on your floor space, nothing more.
By retaining ownership of the infrastructure, Meter removes this tension entirely. By acting like an electricity provider, all the risk for the hardware and installation is on them. Where the electric company charges for use by kWh, Meter charges for use on a square footage per month basis, irrespective of your hardware requirements.
Under Meter’s model, a capital cost that might have been £10 million goes to zero. Meter does not take CapEx and amortise it over OpEx it absorbs the entire capital risk, and customers pay only the operational cost of keeping their networks running every month.
Crucially, this is not simply a financing arrangement dressed up as a service. What customers receive alongside the zero-CapEx model is continuous lifecycle management.
All hardware upgrades and software are included as part of the contract. As the infrastructure operators, Meter want all their customers using the latest versions, they do not want to be managing multiple versions of legacy hardware or software, and so the customers’ network improves over time without them having to budget for or project-manage a refresh cycle.
This is a material shift for IT and finance teams alike. Infrastructure refresh projects are among the most disruptive and politically charged exercises in enterprise IT. They require capital approval, vendor selection processes, lengthy deployment windows, and significant risk of configuration errors during migration. Meter removes all of that from the equation.
And while infrastructure-as-a-service concepts often resonate most in new builds, for Meter the majority of its deployments involve replacing existing equipment. More than half of their business is conducted on ‘brownfield’ rather than ‘greenfield’ sites.
In these brownfield instances, Meter’s approach is straightforward: it buys out the existing infrastructure at a fair market rate. Enterprises can transition from legacy sunk-cost investments to a subscription model without waiting for a scheduled refresh or a major redevelopment program.
Where Meters’ ‘utility’ vision works well
Morgan Cyber Solutions are of the opinion that the analogy that underpins Meter’s entire worldview; ‘internet as utility’ works today for a wide array of organisations including retailers, hospitality, and education.
Retailers and hospitality
For operators managing multiple sites, the challenge of maintaining consistent network performance using inconsistent legacy infrastructure is considerable.
While these networks are often not groundbreaking (handling stock management, EPOS, customer Wi-Fi, and some basic IoT requirements), it’s a trading necessity that all of these are handled reliably. With Meter in control, if an issue arises there is just one call to make to one supplier, not multiple calls just to work out what the issue might be. Over several hundred sites, this one benefit alone could save several hundred hours.
The subscription model also means costs are predictable; a very attractive quality for low margin, high volume transactional businesses where unforeseen costs can have a significant impact on a balance sheet.
Education
Schools, colleges, and universities present some of the most demanding networking environments of any sector, while capital expenditure on IT infrastructure competes directly with teaching and facilities.
Here, Meter’s zero-CapEx model becomes particularly compelling, creating the scenario where institutions can deploy enterprise-grade networking without diverting funds from frontline priorities, also helped by Meter potentially buying existing hardware at a fair market price.
Beyond the financial case, Meter’s software-led management and automated configuration reduces the burden on in-house IT staff a significant advantage in a sector where specialist networking expertise is hard to recruit and retain.
With built-in security controls all managed through a single platform, institutions can meet their duty-of-care obligations without bolting on additional tools from multiple vendors.
How to get started
Morgan Cyber Solutions are delighted to be one of the first Meter partners in the UK.
We believe this is a new and exciting way of re-thinking IT network management and will offer immediate benefits to many organisations. We also appreciate that as a new way of doing things, customers will also have questions.
> book an exploratory call with our team and a Meter representative by clicking here:
> Contact us: hello@morgancyber.co.uk
> 0331 123 150
