Amazon’s Sidewalk Will Soon Share Your Internet With Your Neighbors Leave a comment

As a lot of our devices these days need to connect to the cloud to complete the setup process, it can be a bit troublesome when you’re trying to setup a new device and you don’t have an internet connection. However, it seems that in the future, Amazon will solve that problem by getting entire neighborhoods to share their internet with each other.

This is through Amazon’s Sidewalk program in which according to Amazon, it will share a sliver of your internet connection with your neighbors and vice versa. This will be done through a variety of Amazon owned smart devices like Alexa smart speakers/displays, Ring security cameras, motion sensors, doorbells, and more.

For those concerned that this will slow down their connection, according to Amazon, bandwidth will be capped at 80Kbps. “The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.”

On paper it sounds interesting, like entire neighborhoods acting as one giant mesh internet, but we imagine that there are plenty of users who might be uncomfortable with this idea. If you want to opt out of Sidewalk, you can follow the instructions here. Note that users who don’t opt out will be automatically opted in on the 8th of June, so you’ll want to hurry.

Filed in Gadgets >Home. Read more about Amazon and Privacy. Source: arstechnica