A look inside MeterUp 2025

What past, present, and future technology leaders think about the next era of networking

There aren’t many moments when the people who shaped the past 50 years of the Internet sit alongside the builders imagining the next 50. MeterUp 2025 brought these voices together, from early pioneers, to cloud giants, to leaders in modern fiber.

What emerged was a collective view of where networking must go. As the world will depend on the Internet far more than it does today, networks need to be reimagined from the ground up.

Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe, whose invention of Ethernet underpins nearly every network system today, opened the dialogue with the perspective that while technologies have evolved, the fundamentals remain. He spoke about the original design principles that made the Internet work–simplicity, openness, resilience–and how those same principles should guide how we build for the next era.

Sanjit Biswas

Sanjit Biswas spoke to lessons from the early days of the cloud: modern infrastructure is built by teams willing to rethink the entire system to remove complexity. The companies that own the full experience can deliver the kind of reliability and simplicity that customers expect.

Kate Johnson

Kate Johnson offered a view from the trenches of the modern Internet. Her perspective highlighted new scaling demands: AI is driving an unprecedented surge in demand for bandwidth, consistency, and reliability. Global networks now feed massive compute clusters and real-time applications that cannot tolerate instability.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella described how he sees the next great infrastructure build out.

The conversations carried over into the networking and Meter Labs expo area, where nine new hardware platforms were physically on display. The experience centered on the fundamentals of networking, how reinvention comes from first principles and high standards in craft.

Watch all MeterUp 2025 mainstage sessions on demand.