’ It illustrates how Amazon thinks about taking the things it builds for internal use to make its own products better, then tries to make those tools available to others as a service. For example, last year it launched an easy sign-on service for bringing devices onto your home Wi-Fi or Zigbee network. This year it made that available for anyone to use.
A particularly interesting example of Amazon’s infrastructure building (which could one day become a service) is the Project Sidewalk wireless protocol it talked about on Wednesday. The protocol was designed for the Ring devices that people place in their front yards. At issue was how Wi-Fi didn’t always cover the area well and Bluetooth couldn’t make it at all. So Amazon tooled the existing unlicensed 900 Mhz spectrum and built a proprietary, and secure, mesh protocol on top.
The protocol supports low data rates, can extend over half a mile, and doesn’t require a lot of power. Rausch didn’t have a lot of details, but said that the radios are already in existing Ring products. He added that a current meshed network of 700 devices in the LA Basin has managed to create a network dense enough for Amazon to build a dog tracking device called Fetch to see how well one might track something over the mesh.
Rausch says Amazon may open up the protocol to others in a year, but was pretty vague on details about chips and the protocol itself. But make no mistake, the infrastructure Amazon has built so its ring hardware can communicate outside has the potential to become a long-range, low-power network for a variety of IoT devices. Just like we have a ton of devices that now incorporate Alexa, we may one day have a ton of devices that incorporate Sidewalk. And if Amazon can see a way to build a network like that, it can certainly see a way to build products and services that would run on top of it.
Is Sidewalk a threat to Sigfox, LoRa or NB-IoT today? No, but it certainly has the potential to be, and for everyone out there clinging desperately to the idea that Amazon is selling products and not services, or that don’t understand the importance of building an ecosystem where everyone wins, the IoT is going to be a rough road. Amazon gets it. ’
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