Amazon Sidewalk will be available this month in your neighbourhood.
Some Amazon Echo devices have spontaneously enabled the new Sidewalk feature, a free neighbourhood network sharing service announced last year. While Amazon doesn’t intend to launch this feature until later this month, it didn’t stop the new feature from being enabled in some peoples’ Alexa apps.
What is Amazon Sidewalk?
Amazon Sidewalk is a free network sharing service throughout neighbourhoods that uses Echo devices as bridges to share a small fraction of your home’s Wi-Fi bandwidth with Sidewalk-compatible devices. There are data caps in place that won’t exceed 500MB, or one-fortieth of your bandwidth. Sidewalk uses Bluetooth low energy, 900 MHz spectrum and other frequencies to create a low-bandwidth network in your neighbourhood.