Amazon Puts Sidewalk in Echo, Ring, and Car Devices, Pushing from Smart Home to Smart City

Amazon recently announced a raft of new products that aim to leverage the company’s popular smart home products to enable new services well beyond the home. The latest versions of the Echo and Echo Show voice control devices, as well as new Ring home security offerings, will also have embedded connectivity for Amazon’s Sidewalk Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) Long Range (LoRa) network. Sidewalk was first floated in October last year, but these latest moves underline Amazon’s commitment to the project. Sidewalk heralds a step change shift in the availability of, as well as the ownership and control of, the consumer Internet of Things (IoT). It may also push consumers to question how much control they want to cede over the smart devices in and around their homes.

Amazon Sidewalk supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Frequency Shift Keying (FSK), and Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) in the 900 MHz band. Sidewalk-enabled devices will be either Sidewalk endpoints or Sidewalk gateways (bridges). The latter will pair Sidewalk connectivity with BLE support for additional connectivity, and Sidewalk gateways will automatically connect or reconnect Sidewalk endpoint devices to allow the network to track and locate enabled devices.

Days ahead of announcing the Sidewalk-supporting new Echo devices (the Echo 4th Generation and the Echo Show 10), Amazon named its Sidewalk technology partners. Semtech, which launched its targeted smart home chips in January 2020, will provide the LoRa silicon, protocol, and network management technology to enable Sidewalk mesh networks to be created, while Silicon Labs’s EFR Wireless Gecko Series products will support both Sidewalk's sub-GHz and BLE protocols. In addition, Nordic Semiconductor announced it was cooperating with Amazon to develop BLE solutions for Amazon Sidewalk.

The Echo will start shipping on October 24, but it won’t be the first Sidewalk-embedded product. Those will be Ring Floodlight Cams and Ring Spotlight Cams. As with the Echo, the Ring cams operate as Sidewalk gateways, but unlike the Echo, they have long been shipping supporting 900 MHz as a way to extend the reach of their lighting connectivity.

Amazon is not restraining its support for Sidewalk to just smart home devices. The company also announced it will extend its Ring unit’s home security offerings brand into the automotive space with three new in-car security devices. One of them, the Ring Car Alarm, will feature Sidewalk connectivity.

Amazon is positioning the Sidewalk network as a platform for third parties to leverage. The first example of this has location tag specialists Tile set to offer a Sidewalk-enabled device that will allow its users to find tagged items out of range of the Bluetooth-paired mobile device. The service and tags supporting Sidewalk are set to be available later this year. Tile tags have previously only supported the BLE protocol.

Sidewalk is an impressive and ambitious project. LoRa has long held the potential to compete with more expensive long-range technologies, most notably cellular, in a bid to offer low-power, low-bandwidth connectivity capable of supporting a multitude of IoT applications and services. One key block on adoption has been funding enough gateways to deliver the reliable and extensive coverage across large geographies. This has limited adoption primarily to industrial and local private networks. That in turn has limited the potential for third-party applications to leverage those networks.

Amazon’s commitment to and investment in Sidewalk has the potential to build out those endpoints in significant density at an incremental cost to its smart home offerings. The company has long seen the long-term value in building a smart home user base over concerns about individual product profitability. Sidewalk is another extension of that farsighted investment strategy.

If the latest versions of its Echo devices continue to appeal to smart home consumers—and the addition of Zigbee smart home hub capabilities in the new devices should provide reasons to upgrade for some existing users—Amazon will be able to leverage its enormous reach and install base to deliver a LoRa network far larger than any before it. After an initial test of Sidewalk’s potential, the company said that some 700 installed Ring lighting products were able to create and support a mesh network that covered much of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the largest metropolitan regions in the United States by land area. Amazon is one of a handful of company’s that through connectivity in its products could support a network that stretches across most urban areas in many countries around the world. With Sidewalk embedded in vehicles as well, that potential expands. With that kind of coverage, Amazon will be able to leverage its Sidewalk network for a new world of consumer applications. As with industrial deployments, it will also give Amazon a way to improve operational efficiency within its own operations. This alone could prove worthy of its investment in Sidewalk.

However, Sidewalk will also provide Amazon capabilities to offer network access to a wide range of third-party devices, applications, and services. ABI Research noted this rich potential for Sidewalk to become a carrier for third-party services when it was first announced. Amazon will be able to charge and potentially control a range of access to its network and capabilities for a range of OEMs and service providers. That creates revenue opportunities for network certification and a range of managed services such as device maintenance, troubleshooting, and Over-the-Air (OTA) upgrades. Amazon’s smart home offerings already extend its reach into distribution, transportation, and other service industries. Third-party support for Sidewalk applications will place Amazon as a trusted partner and/or a competitor in many more. For its part as network owner and operator, Amazon will gather insights into the appeal of services leveraging its network. In addition, the network would be particularly valuable to towns and cities because it would be able to support smart city sensor networks that would underpin far more efficient use of city resources without each city having to find budgets to fund and deploy such network basic network capabilities, freeing investment to develop and deploy valuable applications.

Yet before Amazon gains the trust and support of third parties on its network, it will have to ensure a level of support and comfort among its own customer base. Sidewalk is a network that demands the support, or at least acceptance, of end users. The network will only exist if end users are comfortable contributing a portion of their bandwidth and their own devices to deliver to Amazon a private network. Amazon stresses that it will provide customers the ability to turn off network support on its Sidewalk bridges and that doing so will not impact the original functionality of the device. In addition, there are maximum upload limits and bandwidth caps to prevent negative impact on bandwidth for Sidewalk supporters.

In a bid to win positive support for its new crowd-sourced network, Amazon has spoken about a “planned proof of concept project” in partnership with the American Red Cross to evaluate the network’s ability to track blood supplies between distribution centers and donation sites. The inclusion of such a public-spirited trial positions the private network squarely as a community benefit.

Amazon pushed into the smart home market with its original Echo devices, spotting the potential for voice control of smart devices in the home. There is no denying the popularity of the technology and the approach with more than 400 million similar devices shipping from a range of similar tech giants around the world. However, voice control remains an application that continues to draw ire over the impact of the devices on consumer privacy. So far, consumers have broadly accepted or supported that lack of privacy in return for useful functionality and low device price points. The addition of Sidewalk and consumer non-deactivation of the feature may yet sway that balance. Amazon will likely have to emphasize the direct end-user appeal for supporting Sidewalk—with additional low-cost or free service—or face end users opting out of an exercise that, while creating a community-rich infrastructure, does so for the benefit of one of the world’s largest and most profitable concerns. 

With Sidewalk, Amazon has the best shot at building a low-power, low-cost LPWA network at huge scale. It has the resources, the technology, the commitment, and the end-user engagement with the products that will underpin the effort. The success of the project will speak to the company’s technical capabilities but its marketing as well. Sidewalk will be a true test not only of LPWA but also consumer confidence and trust in a greatly expanding role for Amazon in their homes, neighborhoods, and civic lives.