“Standards are great they break the ice, dabbling this way is oh so nice…” these paraphrased words from an old song could be an anthem of IoT. The problem is that breaking ice and dabbling don’t get things installed. Indeed, the first step in that is actually having something to install. Amazon, one of the web giants already under pressure for anti-competitive behavior, is launching something that could well add fuel to that fire, but it could also put a realistic face on IoT, which is something we darn sure need.
The source of all this potential for good and bad is Sidewalk, an Amazon-created device protocol that’s designed to let people build simple IoT networks from cheap devices, over fairly large areas. Sidewalk will join a bunch of other protocols like X10, Zigbee, Insteon, and of course Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G’s own IoT protocols, including NB-IoT. There’s not a lot of side-by-side (no pun intended) information available on how Sidewalk matches up with these old and modern competitors, but there are some general comments.
It may not matter much how the technologies match up, though. What Amazon is promising is to use its Ring (acquired) brand to promote a host of devices operating over Sidewalk. It’s very possible, even likely, that Amazon will deploy its own IoT ecosystem, something like Insteon did years ago in the home control space. Amazon is also likely to target home control, but Sidewalk has broader potential.
The name expresses Amazon’s desire to deal with the short-range limitations of current in-building IoT protocols, but without the higher device costs of full WiFi or (worse) 5G. Extend your IoT to the “sidewalk” and beyond, Amazon invites users. The range of Sidewalk is somewhat variable depending on the situation, but up to a half-mile is reasonable and in some cases, it could be even longer. For those of us who lack vast estates, it’s hard to imagine that even the shorter range could fail to support devices ranged over a property.
You’ve got to open any Sidewalk discussions with a caution. IoT protocols aren’t something you download the Library of Congress over, or use for interactive 6K video editing. They don’t replace WiFi, including WiFi 6, for local broadband connectivity and they don’t replace 5G (or 4G, or whatever) for cellular service. They’re designed to make it possible to connect cheap sensors and controllers into a network, probably one around a “hub” that lets you manage how all the information that’s collected, and all the stuff the controllers let you do. So don’t get swept away by comparisons between Sidewalk and other protocols with very different missions. Cheap, simple, secure, is what Sidewalk is about.
That, and products. Amazon’s decision to launch a new protocol that’s integrated with new devices (in the Ring family) is a smart one, because it makes adoption of Sidewalk a byproduct of building a larger Ring ecosystem, something Ring users are already somewhat committed to doing. Amazon will also make the specifications available to other device-builders, which means that surely others will jump on the bandwagon to leverage Ring’s footprint. Despite the pledge of public specs, though, Sidewalk is an Amazon development and not an industry standard. That’s the downside, so now let’s look at the upsides.
More Ring, further away, is the obvious mantra of Sidewalk, but there are other themes less obvious. For one, it seems to me that it’s a certainty that Amazon will be providing cloud services in support of the broader Sidewalk mission. Ring devices already offer cloud-hosting of events. If a Sidewalk home/building network combines with a WiFi gateway (that can also provide custom programming for how sensor events influence controllers to do things like turn on lights), then it can have its own relationship with Amazon’s cloud. I believe, from what rumors I hear, that Amazon intends to provide a range of cloud services for Sidewalk, ranging from simple extensions to the old Ring services to actual AWS features that let people or third-party developers build applications around Sidewalk gear.
That would be an interesting extension in itself, but there could be more. Listen to a quote from Amazon’s blog on Sidewalk (italics mine): “just a week ago Amazon employees and their friends and family joined together to conduct a test using 700 hundred Ring lighting products which support 900 MHz connections. Employees installed these devices around their home as typical customers do, and in just days, these individual network points combined to support a secure low-bandwidth 900 MHz network for things like lights and sensors that covered much of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the largest metropolitan regions in the United States by land area.”
Home networks combining? It sounds like an IoT mesh, a step that would take home control beyond the home and securely into the classic IoT domain. If you don’t think this is proof enough of Amazon’s broader “federation ambition” how about their first Sidewalk device: “this week we announced Fetch, a compact, lightweight device that will clip to your pet’s collar and help ensure they’re safe. If your dog wanders outside a perimeter you’ve set using the Ring app, Fetch will let you know. In the future, expanding the Amazon Sidewalk network will provide customers with even more capabilities like real-time location information, helping you quickly reunite with your lost pet.”
What good is a dog-locating tool that lets you either find your dog in your own yard, or find out it left it. That’s what most owners of wayward dogs can do already. “Real-time location information” is valuable if the location is somewhere other than on your patio. Amazon is obviously intending to provide a means to link their Sidewalk networks and provide a means of controlling what information can be shared among them. This is a real step beyond home control.
My sources tell me that Amazon is looking beyond the home, not only in geographic terms but also in mission terms. Sidewalk is a strong candidate for smart building applications because of its greater range. Campus applications would also be possible, and perhaps easy if my rumors about linking multiple facility networks into a federated complex are accurate.
A federation of home/facility IoT networks would be highly interesting, if done right. Obviously few people are going to be interested in having their neighbors control their thermostats or turn their lights on and off, but it is very likely that users of facility IoT would be interested in something like “groups”, where people and/or companies would define specific IoT communities with specific policies for event- or controller-sharing. Obviously, that would require formidable security protections, not only in ensuring that only specified “shares” were allowed but also in making sure that people understand the implications of the sharing strategy they set. Amazon would need to protect itself against liability here.
If this is what Amazon plans, it would be a practical on-ramp to a broader model of IoT, even one approaching the utopian (and unrealistic) one of having all sensors and controllers open on the Internet. A model, I might add, that would have product/vendor backing from a powerful source. Anyone with sensors or controllers could “federate” them to unrestricted use, though of course that would render them open to DDoS attacks and other hacks. Just what things might be done to protect this open model could be tested in Amazon’s live testbed, on the Sidewalk, so to speak. I’d like to see Amazon make a go of this, and also that others copy the approach. We could see a realistic path to at least a broad form of IoT at last.