This announcement with Swisscom, as reported in Telecom Review Europe , is a very nice win for Bitdefender in the home router security space. Building on recent contracts with a major Tier 1 carrier in the U.S and with Orange Morocco, Bitdefender announced yesterday that its ‘Smart Home Security’ router agent is driving the home router security suite of Swisscom, Switzerland’s incumbent telco. Whereas North America has a sizeable footprint of home routers running advanced cybersecurity software, Europe is an almost entirely greenfield market. Deutsche Telekom recently reported a milestone of 1 million open source RDK-B home routers deployed across it’s European affiliates. With most of those running cybersecurity security agents, that’s probably the largest footprint of any European telco.
Interestingly, F-Secure stated during an investor ‘Deep Dive’ yesterday that its own ‘Sense’ home router security agent is not included in the suite of consumer security software it is targeting at its Tier 1 telco partners now. CEO, Timo Laaksonen, stated that Sense “is not something we’re looking at as a Tier 1 proposition as much as it is for retail and other commercial partners.” In Europe there’s a potential market for home router security agents of more than 230 million households. So a couple of million down, as many as 230 million to go then.
