NaaS Specialist Meter, Lumen Technologies Team On Combined WAN/LAN AI Connectivity

‘[Lumen] is going to combine what they do great in bringing fiber [as] one of the great fiber networks with what we do on the entire networking stack side,’ Meter co-founder and CEO Anil Varanasi says of the newly minted partnership during his keynote at MeterUp 2025.

NaaS Specialist Meter and telecom service provider Lumen Technologies have teamed up to offer a unified WAN and LAN connectivity offering in a convenient “click-to-buy" model for enterprises, the companies announced.

Unveiled Tuesday at MeterUp 2025 in San Francisco, the Lumen x Meter service will reduce deployment challenges and help enterprises optimize network performance and scale their connectivity needs across complex and distributed environments, the two companies said.

“[Lumen] is going to combine what they do great in bringing fiber [as] one of the great fiber networks with what we do on the entire networking stack side,” said Anil Varanasi, co-founder and CEO of Meter, during his keynote at MeterUp in San Francisco Tuesday.

[Related: Lumen Technologies To ‘Relentlessly Pursue’ A Digital Future, Says CEO]

The offering combines Lumen’s high-performance WAN with Meter’s intelligent LAN platform in a software-defined connectivity service that helps businesses connect, scale and manage their networks from edge to cloud in the AI era, the two companies said.

Through Meter Connect, the company’s tool that searches local ISPs, such as AT&T and Verizon, and ranks quotes to best fit a customer’s performance requirements and budget, users can purchase the new, integrated WAN-to-LAN offering, San Francisco-based Meter said.

Lumen x Meter gives customers accelerated site activation compared with traditional offerings. The service also serves up both WAN and LAN performance metrics through the Meter Dashboard, including circuit health and installation metrics from Lumen, Meter said.

The two companies are also developing deeper integrations that will bring WAN insight and automation directly into Meter Command, the company’s generative AI interface for network management that lets enterprises use natural language control to manage their network stack, Meter said.

Lumen Technologies in July introduced the Lumen Connected Ecosystem that customers can use to purchase, provision and manage their network services as easily as they do their cloud solutions, the company said. Lumen CEO Kate Johnson said that Lumen x Meter is one example of the services on the Connected Ecosystem that can be tapped by customers and partners.

“With the Meter and Lumen partnership, together we’re solving a problem called ‘complexity.’ With their intelligent LAN platform and our intelligent WAN platform with this unified procurement through deployment and customer experience, we’re taking all the complexity [out] and just making it easy to take what you need in the world of AI and thrive,”Johnson told CRN.

Meter, which also has a strategic partnership with Microsoft that allows customers to deprecate costs from their Microsoft Azure agreements, wants to grow its ecosystem of technology partners, which will ultimately mean more benefits to partners and end customers, Varanasi told CRN.

More technology partnerships will be coming down the road, he added.

Via the company’s existing Microsoft partnership, the joint Meter/Lumen offering will also be available through the Azure Marketplace, the two companies said.