Xfinity
Is Turning WiFi Into Home Security. ADT and Brinks Should Pay Attention
Disruptive innovation and competition
can come from anyone and anywhere.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN
Sep 22, 2026
Every time I pay a bill
for my home security service, I find myself wondering exactly what the value is
that I’m allegedly receiving. It’s been a few decades and there hasn’t been a
single instance of activity—our pets don’t even trigger any alarms. I’m pretty
sure we’re among the millions of families who’ve gone for months if not longer
without ever even turning the systems on. We do replace the batteries in our
smoke alarms on a regular basis, but they don’t really depend on paying Brinks
or ADT in order to operate.
If my insurance company
didn’t offer me some modest home insurance discount for having the service, I’m
pretty sure we would have bagged the whole thing by now. I guess we’d keep the
signs and window stickers, as those are probably the major deterrents in the
whole deal. I’m sure there are folks who can recite hair-raising and
instructive instances of the benefit of these services, but it’s certainly not
me. It feels a little like buying flood insurance when you live in the middle
of the desert, although with climate change these days, I guess even those
folks can’t be sure of what’s coming down the pipe. They can be certain,
however, that if they suffer a loss, their gigantic deductible will make sure
that they feel some significant portion of the pain.
All of which brings me
to a new offer by Xfinity that seems to raise a serious competitive threat to
the firms protecting us against home invasions, break-ins and burglaries. It’s
called Xfinity Shield, which is described as an “always-on” home protection and
security platform. I want to give them immediate props for recognizing that we
lazy civilians can’t really be trusted to turn our own systems on and off on a
daily basis. Their new basic program is free and relies on your existing WiFi
and certain other equipment in order to work. Don’t get me started on how often
my WiFi and cable connections go down, but it happens more often than you’d
expect.
In any event, while I
often talk about the many benefits of riding someone else’s rails, which means to partner or
rev share so you can utilize their existing channels and infrastructure in
order to avoid the costs of building your own, it’s even smarter and cheaper to
double down and add, extend or bolster your existing offerings and infrastructure
to create new products and services that you can provide to your existing
customer base. But the Shield service is a great example of another important
competitive strategy which is moving into adjacent markets where there are
substantial opportunities. Frankly, I would guess that the major security
firms—even with the advent of Ring doorbells and similar offerings—wouldn’t
ever have imagined that entities like Xfinity would move directly into their
space.
The WiFi Shield service
provides in-house movement alerts and nighttime monitoring without incremental
hardware. The claim (which I’m not vouching for) is that enhancements to their
WiFi services will detect changes in the radio frequency signals that are being
constantly passed between their Gateway head device and WiFi-connected devices
in the home and then send a signal to you through their phone app when there
are unfamiliar or unexpected changes. As long as you sleep with your phone
nearby, I guess this works if the notifications are audible, although the one
thing I don’t love about my current system is the absolutely deafening sirens
that go off inside and outside the house, which aren’t part of the basic
Xfinity deal. Needless to say, for additional fees, there’s a full menu of
additional equipment, cameras, services, and upcharges which will let you build
a system that more closely resembles the typical home platforms and packages.
The simple morale of
this whole story is that disruptive innovation and competition can come from
anyone and anywhere including the players we regard as laggards and last
generation performers who are stuck in the hardware business while software
rules the world. But the Xfinity Shield is a very important example of how new
technology and advanced software and signaling can take existing rails and
connections and re-energize and update them to support and offer new
competitive services at price points (including free) that will give the big
guys in security like Brinks and ADT plenty of headaches beyond wondering about
Ring and its doorbells.
