Norton Core

» see us.norton.com/core as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Symantec showed the Norton Core at CES in January 2017: a faceted dome in silver or gold, sold on the premise that an antivirus company was better placed to defend a house than a networking company was. The router inspected traffic for malware, blocked sites it judged unsafe, and reported back through a phone app that gave your home a security score out of a hundred. TIME listed it among the 25 Best Inventions of 2017.

It was never on sale anywhere near me. The router in a Turkish house in 2018 was whatever TTNet or Turknet shipped in the box with the line, and it was free, and nobody chose it. Buying a router at all was an enthusiast decision here, and buying one with a monthly fee attached was not a thing that was on offer.

Where it was on offer, it did not sell. Australia got it in June 2018 at A$399 through Harvey Norman as the only stockist, and the trade press reported that under twelve percent of the launch stock moved before the price was cut to A$298 to clear the shelves. On 31 January 2019 Norton stopped the product worldwide, in the careful phrasing of its own support note: "After January 31, 2019, we will discontinue opening service on Norton Core."

~ the dossier ~

~ the dome ~

Most routers are designed to be hidden, which is a problem for a router whose selling point is protection you cannot see working. The Core answered that by being an object, a geodesic shape meant for a shelf rather than a cupboard, with the antennas inside the faceting. Reviewers liked the industrial design more than the product, and it picked up a place on the TIME list mostly on that strength.

The functional claim was deep packet inspection at the edge of the house, covering televisions and anything else indoors that could not run security software itself. That part was real. The part that was not real, at least in Australia, was the mesh networking: the hardware was marketed as mesh-ready and the firmware to make a second unit work with the first never arrived there.

~ the subscription ~

The Core came with a year of Norton Core Security Plus, and after that you paid. Australian coverage put the renewal at A$17.99 a month for up to ten devices, and a separate Norton Wi-Fi Privacy subscription sat beside that at around A$75 a year. So the full price of the thing was a good mid-range router plus a recurring fee, to keep it doing the job it had been bought for.

Meanwhile Google Wifi and Eero and the rest of the mesh market charged once and then nothing. Industry renewal rates on consumer security subscriptions were running under twenty percent at the time, which means the business model needed a customer who would keep paying in a category where most people stop.

~ the three-year tail ~

Norton handled the ending better than most hardware companies do. Its policy statement said software and subscription support would run for three years from the end-of-sale date and hardware warranties for two years from purchase, and it kept to that. The original end-of-support date was January 2021 and it got pushed back to 15 April 2022, so the last Cores kept inspecting packets for three years and ten weeks after the product was killed.

Symantec's consumer half became NortonLifeLock later in 2019 and is called Gen Digital now. us.norton.com/core, the address printed on the box, resolves to the company's current site.

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