Your insurer may soon ask how old your router is

Under a draft claims annex circulating among a group of European home insurers, a household policy could in future distinguish between a forced door and a forwarded port. Where an intruder reached a connected lock, camera or alarm through network equipment whose manufacturer had stopped issuing security updates, the loss would be assessed as a maintenance failure rather than as a straightforward burglary.

The reasoning is not new; only its subject is. A claim can already be reduced where a chimney was never swept or a boiler never serviced. The annex would simply extend the list of things a household is expected to keep in order, and the new entry would read: the small plastic box in the hallway that nobody has touched since installation day, on which the dust is now thicker than the manual.

In practice the change would arrive as a question on a form. A claims handler would ask for the model of the device, the date of its firmware, and whether the manufacturer's stated support period had expired. Two of those three facts an average household can eventually produce. The third is printed on nothing, and the annex concedes that the insurer would have to establish it on the customer's behalf.

“We would not be asking anyone to become a network engineer,” a spokesperson for the working group would be expected to say. “We would be asking what we already ask about a smoke alarm: is it the one that was fitted, and does it still do the thing it was sold to do. The uncomfortable part is that a smoke alarm chirps when it gives up. A router does not chirp. A router that has given up looks exactly like a router.”

Consumer groups would attack at the most obvious point: most households did not choose the device the claim would turn on. The box arrived from the internet provider, or came with the flat, or belongs to the building's shared camera system. The party who selected the hardware, the party who pays the premium and the party who is burgled are routinely three different people, and until now only the last of them had a policy.

The insurers' logic would nonetheless be uncomfortably consistent. If supported equipment earns a cheaper premium, then cover acquires an expiry date, and that date would be printed not on the contract but on the underside of the box, in a field nobody reads at the till. The cost of obsolescence would move quietly from the manufacturer to the household, arriving as a reduced settlement rather than as a price rise.

Nothing has been underwritten. It is an annex, a working group and several carefully worded paragraphs. But every component is already in place: devices that now carry a declared support period, a claims tradition built on maintenance, and the oldest habit in the industry, which is that anything measurable eventually becomes something priceable.