INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
At its annual hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced Sidewalk, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol the company
is developing to connect all of the IoT devices in and around your house.
Amazon argues that Bluetooth and WiFi don''t have enough range,
while 5F takes too much power and is too complex.
We came up with something that we call Amazon Sidewalk,& Amazon device chief Dave Limp
&Amazon Sidewalk is a brand new low bandwidth network that uses the already existing free over the air 900 megahertz spectrum
We think it will be great for keeping track of things, keeping things up to date — but first and foremost, it will extend in the distance
at which you can control these kinds of simple, low-cost, easy-to-use devices.
The details here remain a bit vague, but Amazon says that you
may be able to use Sidewalk to connect to devices that can be up to a mile away, depending on how the base station and devices are
positioned.
Amazon already sent out 700 test devices to households in L.A
to test the access points — and once you have a lot of access points, you create a network with some pretty broad coverage.
Amazon says
it&ll publish the protocol so that other device makers can also integrate it into their devices.
The first product that uses Sidewalk? A dog
tag, so that you&ll hopefully see fewer lost dogs on your local Nextdoor in the near future because if your dog now leaves the perimeter,
This new tag, the Ring Fetch, will launch next year.
