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Amazon Sidewalk – also uses neighbor’s network

Amazon Sidewalk was already announced in 2019, and is now to be activated in the USA in June. With the free Sidewalk network, there should then always be a WLAN connection, in case of doubt via the neighbor’s network.

Automatic activation in the USA

The neighborhood network Amazon Sidewalk is to be activated from 08 June 2021 quite automatically in the USA. Actually, the network should already start its service at the end of 2020, but this had been postponed. Amazon’s service is a free offer, which can of course also be deactivated. Users only have to deactivate it in the account settings. The service is used to bring devices that no longer have an Internet connection to the Internet anyway. Amazon Sidewalk also uses neighboring networks for this.

Amazon Sidewalk is available to some Amazon devices, such as Echo, Ring and Alexa products, as well as motion sensors, outdoor lighting and surveillance cameras.

Different wireless technologies

For Amazon Sidewalk to work, the service uses three different radio technologies. Here, gateways offer either LoRaWAN or a proprietary FSK (frequency-shift keying) method as the transmission medium (physical layer, PHY) in the 2.4 GHz band Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and additionally in the license-free 900 MHz radio band. The Amazon devices use part of the connection capacity so that foreign Sidewalk-capable devices can be brought onto the Internet as neighborhood gateways. This only happens when the device in question has been disconnected from its normal connection or can no longer be reached via WLAN.

The data rate, which is cut in the process, is kept rather low, so a maximum of 80 Kbit/s and a maximum of 500 MB per month and account are used. Amazon Sidewalk is a narrowband network for the Internet of Things (IoT > Internet of Things).

Data will be protected

With the new service, naturally come privacy concerns. In particular, through the use of different radio technologies, is an attack surface given, which is why data protectionists recommend to disable Amazon Sidewalk.

Amazon itself assures that data protection is guaranteed. The data is encrypted during transmission and the transmission ID is also changed every 15 minutes. This is to prevent the tracking of certain devices and also the assignment to users. However, a certain skepticism about the narrowband network remains for now, even though the concept has not shown any flaws so far.

The concerns come mainly from the fact that the radio technology has been attacked again and again. As a result, better and better encryption standards have been introduced over the years to provide more security. Such a further development is now also expected from the techniques used in the network. Especially because the devices have access to very private data.

Amazon Sidewalk will initially only be offered in the U.S. It is still unclear whether this service will also come to Germany. Nevertheless, American users are advised to turn off the service when it is not needed. Amazon Sidewalk requires a particularly high level of trust, even if the data is encrypted, it is an extensive data collection.

Simon Lüthje

I am co-founder of this blog and am very interested in everything that has to do with technology, but I also like to play games. I was born in Hamburg, but now I live in Bad Segeberg.

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Amazon Sidewalk was already announced in 2019, and is now to be activated in the USA in June. With the free Sidewalk network, there should then always be a WLAN connection, in case of doubt via the neighbor’s network. Automatic activation in the USA The neighborhood network Amazon Sidewalk is to be activated from 08 … (Weiterlesen...)

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