The Norton Core router is impressive out of the box, the geodesic dome looking like a scaled down model of a nuclear research facility or perhaps the macguffin in a sci-fi movie. The promise of the Core is to protect all the connected devices in your home at the network level; like adding a subscription of antivirus to your phones, smart TVs, baby monitors and anything else that talks to the internet.

The Norton Core has all the latest networking acronyms on the box — (MU-MIMO) technology, with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi if that’s your thing — which means it’s as fast as any router on the market, and capable of handling many different devices at once; important for a modern smart home. The Core can also cope with multiple 4K video streams, without falling over.

Setup is painless, via accompanying mobile apps. The apps are surprisingly simple and much nicer to use than traditional web interfaces on low-end modems and routers. I was dreading testing this device — as I’ve had awful experiences with routers and modems in the past — but getting the core onto our network took just a few minutes.

Once everything is connected, the router downloads new security definitions and gets to work scanning the traffic coming in and out of your home. The security used is impressive; deep packet inspection and intrusion detection are features I’d normally expect in an enterprise networking product, not something intended for the home.

The parental controls and quality of service settings are also simple and intuitive — letting you set up Wi-Fi rules and downtime on any device, and group devices by owner — for example allowing you to turn off Wi-Fi across for your child's smartphones, consoles and other devices at 8pm every night.