With the launch of Amazon Sidewalk Bridge Pro, the cloud giant aims to increase its influence on IoT networks within businesses, agriculture and other non-residential areas.
Amazon Sidewalk has been around since 2019 and started interconnectivity between Amazon brands Ring and Echo. Both product lines stay connected to each other and to other devices nearby, even when your Wi-Fi network is down at home. Thanks to a combination of Bluetooth and LoRa technology, it shares your private Internet with neighbors to ensure that connectivity. That sounds like a privacy nightmare, especially toward our strict European GDPR rules. That’s why the service is only available in the U.S. today.
The idea behind Amazon Sidewalk started in the private world, but is expanding to professional use with the Amazon Sidewalk Bridge Pro. Under the Ring brand name (owned by Amazon), the antenna can guarantee connectivity up to over 5 kilometers in ideal conditions.
Helping IoT industry
Stefano Landi, director of Amazon Sidewalk, told TechCrunch that it wants to build a network to help the IoT industry. “The Sidewalk Bridge Pro is a professional bridge built specifically for use outside residential areas to guarantee connectivity virtually anywhere. Think commercial zones, parks, campuses, as well as agriculture and industry.”
Since Amazon Sidewalk is only available in the U.S. today, chances are the Sidewalk Bridge Pro will focus on the same territory first. Amazon is not disclosing a price and is only taking on projects on a proof-of-concept basis today.
That doesn’t take away from the huge potential that combining professional Sidewalk hardware in tandem with AWS could be an interesting proposition for future IoT projects. Wait and see when Amazon broadens its scope further, if it wants to do so within the Sidewalk concept.