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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Thursday! I’ve been wanting to share today’s Deep Dive with you for a long time.

Normally, when people ask me “What are you writing about?” and I say the name of the company, at least half the people say something like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them, they’re the ones who…” or “That’s so and so’s company, right?”

When I’ve mentioned Meter, nine times out of ten, I’ve been met with: “Huh? Who’s that?” These are people in tech, other investors, people whose job it is to know today about the companies that will be worth the most money tomorrow. Blank stares.

That is what I live for. Meter has the widest gap between promise and awareness of any company I’ve covered, and I’m pumped to be the one to get to tell you about them.

Because the one out of ten who does know about Meter knows. The Meter Fan Club, small but ravenous, has been a secret society. Today, it’s no longer secret.

Note: the essay is too long to fit in an email; click to read the whole thing online.

Then print it out. Get it bound. Highlight it. Save it. Come back to it. Enjoy.

Or if you prefer your Deep Dives in your ears, the audio edition will be up soon — check back here in an hour or so, or go to the ElevenReader App.

Let’s get to it.

Meter: The Internet Utility

At the turn of the 20th century, back when electricity was new and before it was a utility, the New York City skyline looked like this.

Back then, when a tenant of a building wanted electricity, they had to go through a long and complicated process.

They’d call the electric company, who would send an engineer to assess the building’s location and suitability for electric installation. Assuming suitability, electrical engineers would design custom electrical plans for each building, which included the placement of wiring, fixtures, switches, and other electrical components. Then they would install wiring and appliances, like light bulbs and chandeliers. Once the building was wired, engineers would run wires from the nearest utility pole to the building, hence the blocked city sky.

Then, the electric company would install a meter to measure electricity consumption for billing purposes, and send representatives to train tenants on the safe operation of electrical systems.

The utilities you don’t think about at all today, like water and power, did not always have the relatively seamless interface that we’re all familiar with: pay bill, access the fruits of an incredibly complex network at the turn of the faucet or the flip of a switch. Nothing ever starts out that way.

When J.P. Morgan asked Thomas Edison to make his Italiante New York City mansion the first private residence in the city to be illuminated solely by electricity, Edison’s crew of workers:

Clopped up in a horse-drawn wagon to Morgan’s nearly renovated mansion at 219 Madison on the northeast corner of 36th Street. They laboriously excavated a large earthen cellar beneath the wooden stable, their shovels rhythmically slinging dirt and rocks into a growing pile. Within the musty space of the dirt cellar, they installed a squat steam engine and boiler to power two electric generators, all of which displaced Morgan’s carriage horses to a nearby stable. The men also dug a ditch connecting the new cellar to the house, lined it with bricks, laid in the electrical wires, and bricked it over. Inside the mansion, decorator Christian Herter supervised the snaking of insulated electrical wires up through the elaborately wood-paneled and plastered walls where ordinarily the gas lines would have gone. These wires were then threaded through every space in the mansion, and new electrical fixtures were installed. In some rooms, electrical wires hung straight down every few feet from small holes in the tall ceilings, sprouting at their tips several small lightbulbs.¹

After all of that, the generators made so much noise as to disturb the neighborhood peace, and the steam engine spit out fumes and smoke that tarnished neighbors’ silverware. Then, a broken spud set fire to the Morgans’ library.

That was 1882. Two decades later, in 1901, the dream of omnipresent, effortless electricity was still that, as captured by Emile Zola in Travail:

The day must come when electricity will be for everyone, as the waters of the rivers and the wind of heaven. It should not merely be supplied, but lavished, that men may use it at their will, as the air they breathe.

The buildout of the electric grid that we know today was a multi-billion, multi-decade process that Brian Potter needed four parts of a series on The Grid (I, II, III, IV) to cover. In addition to the grid itself, each individual home, factory, and office had to be wired to receive and utilize the electrons that the grid delivers. That takes investment, buy-in, and time. Lots of time.

The project continues, and will continue. Infrastructure projects are endlessly expansive.

But the current state of things is that when you move into a building – a home, an office, a warehouse, a store, any building really – it’s already wired up for electricity. The electricity comes with the building. You just move in, sign up, and turn on.

That is not how the internet works for companies, yet.

While each building has internet from one or more ISPs running into it, a working network doesn’t just come with the building.

The network is customized from scratch each time: new ISP contract, new network design, new hardware, new security, new software. IT teams work with a fragmented set of vendors. One company provides the internet (the ISP), another designs the network, another sells the hardware (either directly or as a value-added reseller), another installs, and yet another provides the software to monitor, manage, and configure the network as a company’s needs inevitably change (managed service provider, or MSP).

And the system works well enough! You’re probably reading this from office WiFi that’s working just fine.

There is some really good networking hardware out there. Cisco’s Meraki is the leader in the space. Meraki generates somewhere between $5-10 billion, and is growing fast. Ruckus makes great access points. Palo Alto Networks makes great security hardware and software; it’s worth $125 billion. Arista makes great switches; it’s worth $136 billion.

That hardware can be CapEx intensive, sure, but as an IT leader at Dollar General told a Tegus interviewer, retailers often prefer CapEx over OpEx because they can amortize the costs over time.

Managed Service Providers do a robust book of business, too. The global MSP market for networking alone is something like $70-80 billion and expected to grow at an 8% CAGR, much faster than the 3% growth CIOs expect for internal IT teams. It’s more fragmented, but huge.

Certainly, setting up and managing a network can still be a pain for IT teams. It’s more expensive than it probably should be. A MSP can’t build the kind of software to manage networks that a company could if the company also built the hardware.

All of which is to say, the internet is not yet a utility, but it does work.

But the internet can and should work much better. It must, as the internet inevitably grows and more and more of what we do gets done in packets.

That is the bet that Sunil and Anil Varanasi made a decade ago, continue to execute against today, and plan to execute against for a very long time.

For the better part of the last decade, they’ve been building Meter.

Meter builds internet infrastructure. That image of the New York City skyline comes from Meter’s onboarding docs, because Meter’s mission is to build the next modern utility, one in which turning on internet, networking, and WiFi is as easy as turning on water or electricity.

“Every building has a power meter and water meter,” the company writes. “We’re called Meter because we believe internet, networking, and Wi-Fi should be just as ubiquitous.”

Meeting Meter

I first spoke with Anil on December 15, 2023.

I later learned that, in anticipation of our call, he had “literally tried to read everything [I’d] ever written.” I learned that this is something he does.

Within two minutes of meeting, he asked how I thought my writing had changed over Not Boring’s four years, then he asked if he could give me his opinion. I said of course.

It had gotten more confident, he observed, but had lost its vitality and freshness. More recently, after we’d gotten to know each other, he recalled the spirit of his message: “The first thing I said was, ‘Yo, what happened to you?’”

Somehow, the feedback came off as true and refreshing, because I’d been feeling it myself without putting it into words. He was right. Damn.

Then, at the end of that same call, Anil said that he would love for me to write about Meter.

Put yourself in my shoes.

Here’s this person who I’d just met, who told me that my writing wasn’t as good as it used to be, then turned around and asked me to do the deepest dive on his company, the one that he and his brother Sunil had been building for a decade in near-silence and that they will probably spend most of the rest of their lives building, that anyone’s ever written, by far.

Now here we are, thirteen months later. I’ve spent more time researching and writing about Meter than I’ve spent on any other Deep Dive.

The subject deserves the treatment. In a short 2022 blog post on Meter, Brie Wolfson wrote:

To understand the space that Meter is operating in and the future they are building towards is to contemplate just how much surface area we are talking about; things held in hands to things fixed in walls, humans to machines, work to play, the ocean floor to in-orbit satellites, city centers to remote neighborhoods, public policy to personal preferences.

By way of agreement, this is the longest Deep Dive I’ve ever written, too. It’s 100 pages. That’s a small book.

After all this time and all these words, I’ve come away convinced that Meter has a shot at becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Today, I’m going to explain why I believe that.

It is both simple and complex, like when someone asks you how you were able to magically see and speak with someone halfway across the world.

You might say, “Oh, I just used Zoom.”

Or you might describe what a packet is, how it is born, the journey it takes, and all of the infrastructure that supports it along the way.

In this piece, I’ll attempt to do both, because if you, like me, believe that there is an opportunity and a necessity for startups to rebuild the infrastructure on which the world runs, then understanding exactly how one of the best to do it does it, in real-time, is valuable information.

So we will talk about what a packet is, how it zips across the globe, and why it matters.

We will of course discuss Meter’s products. It builds hardware (switches, security appliances/firewalls, wireless access points, cellular access points), software (OS, firmware, Connect, and Command), and operations (from design to installation to ongoing support).

We will talk about why, despite the half a trillion to ten trillion in networking company market cap, depending on how you define a networking company, there’s a need for a vertically integrated new entrant. And why, despite all the market cap available, there aren’t many new entrants - maybe one or two legitimate newcomers a decade. This isn’t software.

We will talk about the challenges and benefits of vertical integration, deeply, because vertical integration is the key to Meter’s present and future.

We will get into the nitty gritty details on everything from architectural decisions to go-to-market to software that’s actually soft. Because a successful vertical integrator is dependent on getting thousands of details right and orchestrating them all.

All of this has remained core to the Meter story since the first time I talked to Anil:

Some things have changed since we started talking, too, or more accurately, have grown.

First, while the importance of networking was kind of clear to me then – no one likes spotty internet, amiright – it has become abundantly clear over the past year that networking is up there with energy as one of the main bottlenecks to the AI data center buildout. In the process, better, faster networking has gone from a “nice-to-have” to strategically critical. Everyone understands the need for power, few understand the need for networking.

Second, my appreciation and understanding of Vertical Integrators has grown, too. Certainly thanks in part to spending so much time learning from Sunil and Anil, my entire investment thesis is that startups have the opportunity to overtake sclerotic incumbents with vertically integrated offerings that are better, cheaper, faster and higher-margin. Meter is a living masterclass in vertical integration.

Third, I have a working thesis that AI supports winner-take-most vertical integrators in previously fragmented hardware markets. Meter is as good of a supporting example as I’ve found.

And finally, Meter’s master plan is entering its endgame, even if it has decades left to go. Specifically, by vertically integrating hardware, software, data pipelines, APIs, operations, and applications, Meter has what it needs to do two things:

1. Enter the Data Center market, which it plans to do this year using the same architecture it uses for local networks to reap the benefits of scale and compounding.

2. Develop autonomous networks by building a foundation model for networking. No other company has all of the ingredients and talent needed to do this. Meter does.

The nature of vertical integration, done right, is that it takes longer to get going, and then it zips. Done really right, by the time the incumbents know you’re coming, you have them in checkmate. To the extent that data is more valuable today, this is more true today than ever.

We will talk about all of this. This is the kind of stuff that I could, and will, nerd out on for thousands of words.

Foundational to all of that, though, or as a necessary precondition to it, is the je ne sais quoi that’s made me want to spend over a year writing this one piece.

The “Oh, I just used Zoom” of Meter is Sunil and Anil.

The Brothers Varanasi

When I wrote in Vertical Integrators: Part IV that the hard-to-define characteristic of truly exceptional founders is that “they make world-class people want to do their best work for them,” I had Anil, and that conversation, in mind. I am not alone.

Nitan Shalon, who leads Meter’s Command product, told me that Anil was one of the main reasons he joined a networking company over the many other opportunities available to someone with his skillset (PhD candidate in EECS from MIT, where he was a researcher in its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) Lab):

“Anil does this weird thing. He’s both a killer and a joking friend at the same time,” Nitan explained. “And he’s extremely ambitious. Scarily ambitious. Getting to work with him directly every day was a big pull.”

I’m one little example. Nitan is one little example. At Meter, there are 100 little examples of exceptional people who joined the company to work with Anil and his complementarily and equally (Anil wants me to say “more”) impressive brother, Sunil.

The Varanasis are like the Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley if Forrest were intentional. They’re somehow involved in the important stuff, quietly and behind the scenes.

Dan Romero, the Farcaster co-founder, met Anil when, back in 2016 or 2017, he doesn’t remember exactly (although he told me to ask Anil, who would remember exactly (he did, it was December 5th, 2015, actually)), he tweeted about some “esoteric crypto-oriented DNS” and got a “random cold inbound from an anon account” saying, “I’d like to meet with you.”

Dwarkesh Patel recently wrote about Anil asking how much it would take him to podcast and blog for six months, back when he was a relative unknown. He said $10,000, Anil gave it to him, he became a really great podcaster, and Anil told him (somewhat) jokingly that he regretted doing it, because it meant that Dwarkesh was wasting his talents podcasting.

Kevin Kwok quote tweeted Dwarkesh and said, “There are many examples of @acv doing this, under the radar. And it's one of the most lovely and impactful things one can do. In general, many things Anil and his brother do that should be more widely emulated.”

One of the reasons that Sunil and Anil Varanasi are not more widely emulated is that they have flown relatively under the radar.

Sure, there was the Ashlee Vance piece in Bloomberg in 2022, the Alex Konrad piece in Forbes when the company raised $35M, and the Fortune piece more recently, which is the kind of targeted PR you get if you know what you’re doing. And finally, after years of asking, Aarthi and Sriram finally convinced their friend Anil to join them on the Aarthi and Sriram Show:

But for the most part, the brothers keep their heads down.

Anil has 1,185 X followers (and 0 tweets) and Sunil, as far as I can tell, has no profile. They stay out of the public spotlight. And yet, everyone in the know seems to know them.

Meter’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Sam Altman, Scott Belsky, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, John and Patrick Collison, Egon Durban, Daniel Gross, Diane Greene, Sam Hinkie, Reid Hoffman, Sanjay Jha, Tobi Lutke, Jay Parikh, Geoff Ralston, Dan Schulman, David Solomon, Allen and Co, WndrCo., which is the kind of cap table you put together if you know what you’re doing.

From this all-star team, too, Sunil and Anil are able to draw out the best work. At the end of my first conversation about Meter with Sam Hinkie, he told me, “I have more interest in helping you with this piece than you would know. Among my favorite pastimes is to brag about my friends and explain how extraordinary they are before even they know it.”

Brie Wolfson, excellent in her own right – Stripe, Figma, Positive Sum CMO, and the author of the defining essay on Taste, among other accomplishments – titled her Meter piece, “Why I’m rooting for Meter.”

I even found a three-year-old Will Manidis cameo when trekking through the G2 comments. Among the other 22/22 5-star reviews, he wrote: “Meter changed my life.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that Will was a Meter fan, too. Unintentionally, he’s recently been tweeting both the thesis of this essay:

And the reason why, despite and because of the fact that Meter is still a young company that you’ve never heard of, I think it’s worthy of such an in-depth study:

If I’m right, then setting out to learn about the Varanasis before it’s obvious that they’re the greats will allow us to access the truth only available during the journey.

After the fact, when they’re billionaires, it will be totally unsurprising that people want to do great work for them. People are inclined to want to do great work for really rich and successful people. They see it as their ticket. Drawing that out of people before most even know about your company, on the other hand… that’s a skill worth studying.

Because this ability to pull the best from the best people, to inspire them to contribute and root, transcends any particular product. There’s a sense you get from the Varanasis that whatever they chose to do, they’d be able to pull it off. Chips, cancer cures, fusion, whatever.

But given how I’ve described them so far – high-performance, reliable, operating quietly in the background, getting the best out of anyone connected to them – maybe what they decided to do was inevitable. Networking is a natural fit.

Meter is not, of course, the first networking company. Cisco, the 40-year-old networking giant, is worth more than $235 billion. It was, at one point, the largest company in the world. The top five companies in the networking space are valued at more than half a trillion dollars combined. Meter is valued at less than half a billion.

So Meter isn’t the biggest, and it certainly isn’t the first, but its ambition is to be the last networking company.

“If there’s a packet moving in the world,” Anil told me, “we hope it will be moving through Meter hardware and software.”

Today, roughly 20 quintillion (20 x 10^18) packets move in the world each year. That unfathomable number is only going to grow, a fundamental bet the Varanasis staked their careers on a decade ago that is now a foregone conclusion.

Meter wants to move all of them.

That is an odd goal, both enormous and specific. Believing that it’s even possible requires a deep technical understanding of how that world works today, and an informed view of how it will work in a couple of decades. It speaks to the brothers’ Brobdingnagian ambition, and their willingness to patiently lay the groundwork on all of the small things that might compound in specifically-unpredictable but aggregately-inevitable ways to realize it.

The story of any startup worth writing about can’t be untangled from the story of its founders, but the Meter-Varanasi knot is tied particularly tightly. When I wrote about Stripe in 2020, I wrote, “It’s hard to take a Stripe bear case too seriously, because there is no way that the Collisons haven’t thought much more deeply about the challenges it faces than anyone else in the world.” There is a similar circular logic at play here.

To understand Meter, we need to understand Sunil and Anil. To understand Sunil and Anil, we need to understand Meter.

It will take the deepest of Deep Dives, a masterclass in Vertical Integrator strategy, the alpha in a well-constructed network, and what it takes to turn infrastructure into a utility. Of course, we’ll cover Meter’s products, how they fit together and compound on each other.

The journey will be winding, splitting and branching off in many directions before, hopefully, coming back together at the end to paint a coherent picture of one of the companies (and two of the founders) I now believe will be among the most consequential of this generation.

In that way, this Deep Dive might look like the journey of a packet itself. Zoom zoom.

Consider the Packet

What have you accomplished in the last 200 milliseconds?

I don’t mean to suggest that you’re lazy – you’re in the middle of reading thousands of words on networking and business strategy, you’re one of the special ones – but, and again, unfair comparison, consider the packet.

Chances are, in the past 24 hours, you’ve been on a Zoom. As you sit there, bored or self-conscious, your camera captures light through its lens and focuses it on a sensor, which converts the light into electrical signals, which are processed by an image signal processor that corrects color, reduces noise, and encodes signals into a format like YUV or RGB. This happens up to 30 times per second.

When you speak up – “Sorry.. yes … can you .. ok, good well I was just going to say…” – the sound waves you emit cause your microphone’s diaphragm to vibrate. These vibrations, too, are converted into electrical signals, and an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) samples these signals, typically at 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz for high-quality audio. The samples are ever-so-briefly stored in a buffer.

Zoom’s software takes this raw video and audio data and compresses it – using a codec like H.264 or VP9 for video, or like Opus or AAC for audio – to reduce the size of the data while maintaining quality. This compressed data is split into smaller chunks, each of which is wrapped in Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) headers that include sequence numbers and timestamps so that all of the chunks can be properly reassembled on the other end.

At this point, somewhere between 6 and 26 milliseconds into the process, the data first becomes a packet, of sorts: an “RTP packet.” These packets are encapsulated in User Datagram Protocol (UDP) datagrams, which add another layer of information about where the data is heading and who can access it.

Our new packet is one of many, over at least 100 created every second on your Zoom call, separated at birth to find their own way across the world only to be reunited on the other end. For this architecture, we have the Soviets to thank, at least in part.

Communications networks used to be “circuit switched”: a connection was established between two points, and data flowed continuously from one to the other. For a while there, when you wanted to call someone, a switchboard operator would manually connect your line to the recipient’s line to create a dedicated circuit for the call.

This was inefficient for obvious reasons, but a bigger concern was that it was vulnerable. A nuclear war could wipe out circuits connecting military leaders, leaving them unable to communicate at the absolute worst time. So the government tasked RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran with designing a network that could survive.

Baran proposed a distributed network with “packet switching,” in which messages would be broken down into small chunks (packets), each of which could take multiple different paths through nodes in the network to their destination.

A few years later, in 1966, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set out to create a network of computers as robust and fault-tolerant as Baran’s telephone network design. They built ARPANET, which went live in 1969 with four nodes, and grew node-by-node, mainly university-by-university, over the next decade.

In 1974, UCLA’s Vint Cerf and ARPA’s Bob Kahn published A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, in which they introduced the Transmission Control Program (TCP) protocol to more reliably and efficiently break data into packets, send it across various routes, and reassemble it at its destination. In 1978, the protocol was split into two pieces – TCP, for reliable data transfer, and IP (Internet Protocol), for routing between different networks – to form the standard TCP/IP protocol on which the modern internet is still largely based.

So that is how the idea for packets was born and grew. But our packet is not quite a real packet yet. It needs its IP header.

Zoom passes the UDP datagram to your computer’s operating system via a socket API, and your OS wraps it in another header, the IP header. The IP header gives routers the information they need to send the packet to the right destination, including (but not limited to) the source and destination IP addresses.

The packet is born.

Like a neonatal nurse, the network interface driver takes the newly born packet and swaddles it in an Ethernet frame. Thus wrapped, the packet is sent to the network interface card (NIC), which converts the digital frame into analog signals – for copper wires, electric signals; for fiber-optic cables, light pulses; for WiFi, radio waves – and transmits them through the wires or air - for transmission over the local network (like your office’s WiFi).

The idea of a local network is newer than ARPANET – computers spoke to each other over long distances before they learned to speak to their neighbors. With mainframes, there was no need for local area networking; people brought their tasks to the machine. Some had dumb terminals attached to them – kind of like computer screens and keyboards with no processing power of their own – but all of the terminals in one location simply interacted with the central machine.

That changed in the early 1970s with the minicomputer. Instead of mainframes that cost millions of dollars, out of reach of most small organizations and departments within larger ones, minicomputers cost anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000. All of a sudden, one company, even one office building or floor in an office building, could have multiple computers, and peripherals, like printers, that worked with them. Which meant: machines needed to learn to talk to each other.

Enter Bob Metcalfe (the Metcalfe of Metcalfe’s Law).

It’s easy to forget this now, now that we take their inventions for granted, but people like Bob Metcalfe were just people – “Metcalfe hailed, as though at the top of his lungs, from Brooklyn and Long Island. He had graduated from Harvard and MIT—bitching every step of the way, to hear him tell it—with degrees in electrical engineering, business, and applied mathematics,” wrote Michael Hiltzik in Dealers of Lightning – with problems to solve.

In 1973, at Xerox PARC, Metcalfe invented Ethernet, not to change the world, but simply to get PARC’s Alto computers to connect with each other. The network had to be cheap – “less than 5% of the cost of the computers it was connecting,” simple, reliable, expandable, and fast. Nothing Metcalfe came up with met all of those requirements, until he remembered a paper he’d read months earlier by a professor at the University of Hawaii on a radio network called ALOHAnet, which was designed to let computers talk to each other across the Hawaiian archipelago, but which, Metcalfe realized after correcting some of the professor’s mistaken assumptions and calculations, and replacing radio transmission with inert physical lines, a passive medium, like the “‘luminiferous aether’” once thought to pervade the universe as the medium for the propagation of light,” would also work for letting computers speak to each other within the same office.

And Bob said, let there be Ethernet.

With Ethernet, computers could share the same coaxial cable to communicate. Instead of serial connections and point-to-point links, CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection) meant that devices could "listen" to the wire before sending data to avoid collisions and retransmit if a collision was detected. Metcalfe’s first version could carry 2.94 Mbps, which seems hair-pullingly slow today but was groundbreaking at the time.

Like many technologies invented at Xerox PARC, Ethernet was commercialized somewhere else. Metcalfe left to start 3COM – Computer, Communication, Compatibility – in 1979, where he brought on Bob Krause as President in 1981 and elevated him to CEO in 1982.

Krause gave an incredible interview on the company’s history on the Seeking Truth in Networking podcast. He said that in the beginning, the cost of Ethernet – the digital card (NIC), transceiver, and cable – was $3,500. He knew the company needed to get the cost down to $1,000, then to $100. They drew an exponential declining curve from $3,500 to $100 over 7 years, and realized that they’d just need to follow Moore’s Law’s 50% cost declines per year.

To do that meant putting Ethernet on a chip – a VLSI, or Very Large Scale Integration – with the NIC and the transceiver on a single card, which they did. Originally, computers with Ethernet Chips were daisy-chained together with a single coaxial cable used as a backbone and each computer connected to the backbone through T-connectors with BNC connections.

That might be the way we did things today if it weren’t for another famous borrower of Xerox PARC technology.

See, Apple was 3COM’s second or third customer. When Krause and the team showed Steve Jobs the daisy-chained setup, he… didn’t love it.

“Who’s the braindead idiot asshole who came up with this?” he asked. “This is shit. This is dreck. If you want to make the thing easy to use just plug the thing into the goddamn telephone jack in the wall.”

Success has many fathers, as does our packet. Steve Jobs is one, partially responsible for the path it travels on its local network, not along a daisy-chained path from computer to computer, but over twisted pair cabling that plugs into a switch as easily as a telephone jack into the wall.

So our packet, just a few milliseconds old, begins its journey across the network. The NIC transmits its signals as radio waves to the access point – here, we first encounter Meter’s hardware.

The access point performs a crucial transformation: it receives these wireless radio signals, converts them back into digital data, and then sends that data to the switch – also provided by Meter – via Ethernet cable (with Power Over Ethernet, PoE, which powers and connects in the same cable).

The switch reads the MAC Address within the ethernet frame to figure out where to send the packet next, whether to another device on the network or to a gateway router that will send it out into the internet. The switch forwards the packet only to the specific port needed to reach its destination, avoiding congestion and increasing efficiency in the network.

Let’s assume that our packet is ready, that it’s time to venture out to the internet, the network of networks. Typically, the switch sends the packet to the router, which, as its name suggests, routes the packet to the destination it reads from its IP header.

In Meter’s case, the security appliance, which is a firewall and router in a single device, serves as the physical router. Its routing stack is a combination of its software-defined router and hardware, which work together to manage traffic, handle IP addresses, and determine the best path by which to send our packet across the internet.

From the security appliance, the packet leaves the Local Area Network (LAN) out into the Wide Area Network (WAN). From the device on the network, it travels through a series of point-to-point links, like fiber-optic cables that use light pulses to transmit data at near light-speeds, to your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) backbone.

At this point, our packet’s journey looks almost like the journey of an electron from generation facility to service panel. In this analogy, the backbone is like the transmission line – it’s the big bundles of fiber-optic cables, buried underground or under the sea, over which data travels very long distances. It reaches the ISP’s border router, and enters the realm of core network infrastructure.

The core network is a place where the internet truly becomes the "network of networks." Here, routers belonging to Tier 1 ISPs—the largest internet providers in the world—exchange data using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the postal system of the internet that decides which paths data packets should take based on a combination of policy, economics, and efficiency. The border router uses BGP to determine the packet’s next hop, typically along one of the high-speed fiber-optic transmission lines that interconnect data centers and ISPs across the country or across continents.

Here, our packet, still barely even a twinkle in its parents’ eyes on human timescale but nearly halfway through its packet-scale life, comes to its first fork in the road.

• If it’s traveling to a destination in its own geographic region or on the same ISP (or an ISP with a peering agreement with its own), it might take a direct route, hopping from the ISP’s network to an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a physical location where networks connect and packets switch lanes.

• If it’s traveling to another country or on another network, it’s likely that it will have to pass through at least one data center.

Ours is traveling across the globe, say to India, the reverse of the journey that the Varanasis made as pre-teens. So it will need to travel through a data center.

Data centers do many things. They are famous now for their role as the training grounds of digital gods, but other, more traditional data centers act as aggregation points, helping to manage and direct the immense amounts of data traveling across countries and continents. It is in one of these more traditional data centers that our packet finds itself, before being shot out into an undersea cable.

Our intrepid packet, now a seasoned traveler at the ripe old age of 50 milliseconds, plunges into the depths of the ocean. It's carried along undersea fiber optic cables, a network of glass threads crisscrossing the ocean floor like the neural pathways of a global brain. These cables, each no thicker than a garden hose, carry 97% of intercontinental data traffic. Our packet is in good company.

As it hurtles through the darkness at nearly the speed of light, our packet might pass by the occasional curious fish or, if it's particularly unlucky, a shark. Sharks sometimes bite undersea cables, though no one's quite sure why.

Upon reaching India’s shores, our packet is shot to a local data center to go through the digital equivalent of customs. The data center’s routers check the packet’s IP address to figure out where to send it next, through India’s domestic internet infrastructure, on to the ISP of its destination. These days, chances are that’s Jio, which offers both fiber and wireless connection.

Less than a decade old and boasting a 52% Indian ISP market share, Jio stands as a testament to the idea that although many of us take internet access for granted, better internet infrastructure remains a work in progress. Expected to IPO this year at a market cap of around ₹10 lakh crores ($120 billion), it is a testament to the massive value that building better internet infrastructure can create.

But our packet cares nothing for IPOs or rupees. It’s almost home. It makes the final sprint over Jio fiber to the local network of the person on the other end of the Zoom.

At last, after a journey of about 200 milliseconds (an eternity in packet time, but less than the blink of a human eye), our packet arrives at its destination and makes the original local network journey in reverse: switch to access point to radio signal then over WiFi to the computer.

Today, in India, our packet likely travels across Cisco hardware. One day, it may be Meter’s.

Finally, our packet begins to disappear.

The receiving computer's NIC greets it and strips away its Ethernet frame. Its operating system peels off the IP header, then passes the UDP datagram up to the application layer, where Zoom's software awaits.

Here, our packet is reunited with its siblings – other packets that took different routes but arrived in the same place within milliseconds. Zoom reassembles them in the correct order, using the sequence numbers in their RTP headers like a jigsaw puzzle guide.

Finally, the data our packet carried is decoded, decompressed, and converted back into audio and video signals. The recipient's speakers vibrate, their screen flickers, and voila! Your awkward interjection is heard and seen, as if by magic, on the other side of the world.

Our packet's job is done. In less time than it took you to read "Sorry.. yes …", it traveled halfway around the world, bringing a tiny piece of your presence along with it. And as you continue your Zoom call, countless more packets embark on the same journey, in a never ending cycle of birth, light-speed travel, and decomposition.

This is the way the world works now, and the way the Varanasi brothers bet the world will work more and more in the future, in the same way that Metcalfe and Krause bet that an exponential curve would continue to run until they could connect all computers in local networks that in turn connected to wider networks that have connected the world.

So among all of the many things that the Varanasis could be doing, they chose to move packets, for three reasons:

1. The internet is phenomenal and there’s merit to making it great.

2. Everything is packets.

3. We all will use the internet, and packets, more than we currently do.

“This call right now is packets,” Anil told me. “When you order an Uber, send an email, it’s packets. The money in your bank is packets. Everything is just packets moving left to right. That’s it. That’s the world.”

Move the packets, move the world.

“We had very particular opinions about how to do that,” Anil said, “and about the business model.”

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Thanks to Sunil, Anil, Sarah, Nitan, Swarit, Dan, Sam, Tom, Bunpa, Evan, and everyone else who taught me how the internet works and how Meter plans to make it work better.

That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with the Weekly Dose.

Thanks for reading,

Packy