Carrier Hub was on hand this week at Meter Circuit, where two brand-new Meter customers sat down for a live, unscripted conversation about what it's actually like on the other side of a network cutover. As a certified Meter partner, we spend a lot of time telling prospective clients what managed networking is supposed to feel like. It's a different thing entirely to watch two people who've lived it, in two wildly different industries, describe it in their own words.
The panel featured Frank Weigel, Director of IT at Perplexity, and Judd Williams, VP of Technology for the San Antonio Spurs. One runs infrastructure for a fast-scaling AI company with offices on three continents. The other keeps an NBA arena, a practice facility, and a soccer field connected on game day. Neither one came into this as an easy sell — and that skepticism is exactly what made their answers worth writing down.
From Meraki to Managed: A Director of IT Learns to Let Go
Frank has been networking longer than most of his own IT team has been in the workforce — he started in a data center "back in the day," and for years ran his own Meraki stack across Perplexity's seven global offices, carrying that familiarity with him as the company grew. What changed his mind wasn't a sales pitch. It was watching his own setup buckle under growth.
As Perplexity scaled its sales organization and put dozens of people on video calls all day, Frank — the only person on the team with real networking background — started seeing the symptoms pile up: Wi-Fi congestion, bandwidth issues, channel overlap, "all the evil stuff," as he put it. Then the company moved into an office roughly four times the size, with four times the access points. The problems didn't scale linearly. They got worse.
"That was really scary. And that really opened my mind toward — let's listen to these guys, see what they can offer... short-term contract, keep some firewalls around just in case."
That's a familiar pattern to us: the decision to bring in a managed provider rarely comes from a clean whiteboard. It comes from a specific, painful moment where the DIY approach stops working. Frank described the implementation and planning phase that followed as "a great experience throughout" — one that built enough trust for him to genuinely hand off networking and focus on what the business actually needed from technology.
A New Office, Zero Network Complaints
The most concrete proof point came from Perplexity's newest office, which opened for business the Monday before the panel — three days before Frank sat on stage talking about it. Opening an office in a market he described as "very heavily regulated, lots of legacy vendors" isn't simple: it means coordinating ISPs, building management, and every vendor with existing lines already in the building.
What stood out to Frank wasn't just that Meter handled the coordination — it was the knowledge Meter brought to a decision his own team couldn't have made on its own: the typical lead time for an ISP connection among the ten-plus vendors already serving that building. Perplexity needed service live within two months. One option would have taken three. Meter's team knew which vendor could actually deliver in the window, and that's the one they signed.
The result, in Frank's words: people came in Monday and started working, and he had "no complaints about the network whatsoever."
Getting the Time Back
The more interesting part of Frank's answer wasn't about the network at all — it was about what his team does now that they aren't managing one. He described shifting attention to the first-day experience for new hires: properly designed conference rooms, wayfinding for offices that have outgrown their old floor plans, and a growing investment in back-end automation so the IT team isn't doing manual work "on the ERT side" anymore.
He also gave a candid answer about where he's still hands-off: Perplexity doesn't have a dedicated wireless engineer, and Frank's own involvement in a new office wireless rollout amounts to telling the team what's possible and stepping back. That's the trade he made — and by his own account, it's one he'd make again.
Two Weeks, One Arena, One Trusted Engineer
Judd Williams came into the Meter relationship from a very different starting point: openly skeptical. The Spurs organization — which supports the arena, the Frost Bank Center practice facility, a Toyota-sponsored soccer field, and multiple corporate and football offices — had just watched a traditional RFP process for arena Wi-Fi fall apart entirely before Meter entered the picture.
"I was very skeptical. I thought, let's see if these guys can do this... I flew out here, I asked every question I could think of, and I walked away like — I think these guys can do this. This is amazing."
What actually built trust wasn't the pitch — it was a Meter field engineer named Lance, who was scheduled to spend a week on-site and ended up staying two, covering "every square inch" of the arena, diagnosing problems the Spurs' own team hadn't identified, and surfacing flaws in their existing Wi-Fi structure without being asked to. The team liked him enough to give him a staff badge. That kind of hands-on credibility, Judd said, did more to calm his nerves than any proposal could have.
The Parable That Explains Why It Worked
Asked what made the Spurs' leadership align behind the decision — not just the IT department, but the executive team — Judd reached for a story instead of a spec sheet: the stonecutter's parable, where it's never the one final blow that breaks the rock, but the ten thousand that came before it. It's a philosophy he said matches how the Spurs organization already operates, on the court and off it. He contrasted that directly with other vendors in the RFP process who came across as condescending and indifferent to how the organization actually worked — a mismatch that, in his telling, mattered as much as any technical spec.
Judd was also candid about a pain point Meter simply removed from the table: distributed antenna systems, or DAS, for in-building cellular coverage. He described his prior experience with DAS vendors as "extremely painful, extremely long," and said avoiding that process entirely — while still solving the coaches' long-standing complaints about no cell service at the practice facility — was, on its own, worth a lot of goodwill across the organization.
Rebalancing the Roster: What Managed Wireless Gives an IT Team Back
The Spurs run their entire technology organization with roughly ten or eleven people — no dedicated wireless engineer among them. Before Meter, that meant pulling network staff off their actual jobs to troubleshoot a seven-year-old Wi-Fi system. Judd's framing of what changes with Meter on board wasn't about headcount. It was about giving his existing team back the job they were actually hired to do.
He also pointed to something specific about Meter's commercial model that removed friction he'd fought through in every previous vendor process: not having to separately negotiate with a hardware manufacturer, an implementation partner, and a support desk as three different relationships with three different sets of incentives.
"Does it cost me anything? He's like, no. So it shifts the question in my mind — what's best for users? ... We couldn't afford more than 80 APs in the bowl before. I think we already have like 128 now. But it doesn't matter — we're focused on what that experience can be."
That last point is worth sitting with. Under a traditional cost-per-room model, every Wi-Fi decision was a budget conversation — and budget conversations tend to produce minimum-viable networks. Removing that friction didn't just make the project cheaper for the Spurs; it changed which questions got asked in the first place, from "what can we afford" to "what do we actually want this space to do."
What They're Still Asking For
Neither guest treated the panel as a victory lap. Asked directly for a challenge to bring back to the Meter team, Frank pointed to ISP contract management — legacy agreements are currently keeping Perplexity from taking full advantage of Meter's carrier relationships, and he's looking forward to unwinding those. The second ask, from a past role, was for more polished connectivity options in smaller, remote international offices — the kind of location that too often still ends up on a consumer-grade ISP device by default.
That's consistent with what we hear from clients across every industry we serve: the value of a managed network compounds as an organization gets more comfortable trusting it with more. Nobody hands over everything on day one, and they shouldn't. The relationship that Frank and Judd both described — cautious pilot, hands-on proof, then expanding scope — is exactly the arc we walk clients through as an advisor.
Carrier Hub is a vendor-neutral technology advisor and certified Meter partner. We were in attendance at Meter Circuit on August 6, 2026. Quotes above are lightly edited for clarity from a live, on-stage conversation; nothing in this recap is sponsored or written on Meter's behalf.