Amazon is expanding its presence in our communities, and it wants our help. The company has created a way to leverage its customers’ broadband and Wi-Fi connections to enable it to expand a private network outside of our homes into communities, creating infrastructure to peddle even more devices and services to us in the future. Over time, these steps from Amazon, with the cooperation of its customers, have the potential to dramatically change the way we behave in our neighborhoods. Called “Sidewalk,” this network technology was announced in September 2019 , though it’s still not fully deployed and some of the devices that leverage it have yet to ship. Sidewalk intends to provide a way for people to network many Amazon devices outside of their residences, taking advantage of the goodwill of people and their neighbors to provide shared mesh connectivity outside of the home. The company refers to this as a “crowdsourced community benefit,” but the larger benefit may be to Amazon itself. Sidewalk is compatible with numerous existing and upcoming Amazon products, such as Echo speakers and Ring security cameras. Unfortunately, it’s an “opt-out” service; disabling it requires changing a setting in the Alexa app . By being opt-in, Sidewalk automatically assumes that we will share a fragment of our network bandwidth with our neighbors in order to extend and increase the network range of Echo and Ring devices up to a half mile outside the home. (The company says that the data used by Sidewalk is capped at 500 MB a month, the equivalent of 10 minutes of HD video.)) Amazon’s newest Echo speaker is also a Sidewalk bridge. [Photo: Amazon] Advertised as “connected convenience,” Amazon Sidewalk aims to improve network connectivity for Echo devices and Ring Security Cams in the home, and to help outdoor lights and motion sensors work more effectively. Amazon mentions “unique benefits” such as supporting other “Sidewalk devices” in the community, and suggests that future developments of “new low-bandwidth devices that can run on or benefit from Sidewalk” such as pet trackers and other offerings that may involve location tracking capabilities. Amazon also mentions that Sidewalk could help with “appliance and tool diagnostics,” which could provide a foothold for the company to learn about people’s appliances—and how we use them. Sidewalk requires Amazon devices that contain Sidewalk Bridges, which include most Echo devices and some Ring outdoor floodlights and surveillance cameras. The technology uses Bluetooth connections, the 900 MHz spectrum, and other frequencies to create a private mesh network between a household’s Sidewalk Bridges and its neighbors, with the idea that if a network goes down, or needs more bandwidth, it can use shared low-bandwidth from other households with Amazon devices that contain Sidewalk Bridges. That way, the Sidewalk network spans beyond any one home’s Wi-Fi. A meaningful name Amazon has given its new technology a name that evokes communal connectivity: It isn’t Amazon “Backyard” or Amazon “Outside,” but Amazon Sidewalk. The sidewalk is physical pavement that is owned collectively by the Commons and offers us, through shared investment, a way to move through neighborhoods and access each other’s homes as well as retail environments.
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With ‘Sidewalk,’ Amazon is building its own private neighborhood networks