Amazon has announced one of its most ambitious projects yet, Amazon Sidewalk. Right now your wifi competes with every other wifi around you. With this new technology, a small part of your wifi will actually communicate and mesh with other devices. It’ll create a huge network of interconnected devices.
“First announced in 2019, the effort is called Amazon Sidewalk, and it uses a small fraction of your home’s Wi-Fi bandwidth to pass wireless low-energy Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals between compatible devices across far greater distances than Wi-Fi is capable of on its own — in some cases, as far as half a mile, Amazon says.”
With this new network in place, you would share bandwidth with your neighbors and be essentially interconnected. It would be a fraction of what’s used by any other device like your phone or smart TV so you don’t have to worry about it slowing things down.
One advantage would be pet trackers. Currently when your pet leaves your own wifi space the device resorts to cell service which drains the battery very quickly. With Amazon sidewalk, your battery life would be extended on these devices significantly. Other than that, Amazon says if you put a chip in your wallet or on your keys and you drop them, you will be able to find them in a wider zone. Outdoor lights, sidewalk lights, wifi cameras, doorbell cameras, these devices will all extend your wifi range around your house as well. Do you use a Tile branded device to help you find your keys or phone? Amazon sidewalk’s expanded network will pick up on these devices. In the past, your Tile needed to come into range of phones that had Tile software installed on it. This will change dramatically if the sidewalk network will get as big as is anticipated. A thief passing by a house with an Alexa, strong wifi, or ring doorbell would trigger a call home to TIle with location information about your device.
Not a fan? Amazon plans to allow users to turn this feature off of course. But as with most things these days people seem to be willing to give up a little for added convenience. You let Google have access to your GPS so it can give you directions. In that regard, Google knows where you are at all times. But would you give up being able to use your phone for directions?
Amazon Sidewalk