I'm not an Amazon home user (I just shop there), but their new "Sidewalk" service really worries me. Sharing your wifi bandwidth from your Echo or Ring devices with others as an opt-out rather than opt-in is wrong. Opening access points to your home network behind your firewall is worse.

WaPost (probably paywalled): https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...ewalk-network/
"Sidewalk, which is built into Amazon devices dating back to 2018, raises more red flags than a marching band parade: Is it secure enough to be activated in so many homes? Are we helping Amazon build a vast network that can be used for more surveillance? And why didn’t Amazon ask us to opt-in before activating a capability lying dormant in our devices?"

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/22463257/am...how-to-opt-out

And to answer my question: If they'd made it opt-in, no one would have played along - for good reason!

I'm sure that some of the people who are complaining about it, are also the same people who happily add other IOT devices from less-well-known companies into their home networks without any way to check their security or bandwidth usage. Hey, as evil as they are, at least Amazon is disclosing this.

My internal router is currently hosting:
- About a dozen computers/tablets/phones.
- Three game consoles.
- Two Chromecasts.
- An HP network printer.
- A Tivo.
- A security camera.
- A smart TV.
- A stereo receiver/amp with smart features.
- A Nest thermostat.
- A Synology NAS running Plex and other fun stuff.

And that's not counting other stuff that happens to be powered off at the moment. How many of those things run the risk of posing similar problems?

All with some elements of risk.

But the Amazon thing is explicitly turning customers into open ISPs without asking for consent.

I think it's a crappy thing to do (and one more reason why I won't put Amazon devices in my house), but it's not without precedent. xfinity has, for years, configured their home routers to have a wifi hotspot open for other xfinity users.

Amazon now owns Eero, the well regarded (and previously independent) brand of home WiFi router/mesh devices.

Are the Eero products excluded from the Amazon Sidewalk system?

From a purely technical perspective, I believe comparing this to an open Wifi hotspot it a little misleading. My understanding is that the Sidewalk network uses a combination of LoRa and Bluetooth Low Energy, not Wifi, so this isn't something you can just connect to with a standard Wifi device and start using someone else's connection.

Most phones do support BLE so it might be theoretically possible to connect a phone to the Sidewalk network, but I don't think a BLE access point is a common thing, so I suspect it wouldn't be totally trivial to connect via a phone. BLE is also quite short range, and LoRa, which is longer range, isn't commonly available in consumer phones/laptops, although you can easily add LoRa support to a Raspberry Pi or Arduino, etc.

I've also not seen it confirmed, but I'm guessing that Amazon themselves are building protections into the network, simply to stop other devices being able to use it, probably including limiting the endpoints that you're able to reach. It's obviously not in their interests if a competing product line can use the Sidewalk network free of charge, so I'm assuming that it isn't simply providing an open link to any Internet endpoint.

None of this removes the privacy concerns, of course, or mitigates the all-too-typical automatic opt-in behaviour, but it's probably worth being aware of the distinctions.

I tend to find myself slightly torn about developments like this. From a techie point of view, I can very much appreciate it: you have a massive network of devices, probably well over half the streets in North America have at least one Amazon device on them, and they all have LoRa chips in which provide a low-bandwidth network that can reach a couple of kilometres from each device. Of course you want to enable that network, it's just plain cool to be able to allow other bits of your tech to communicate back to base for free on a tiny power budget in almost any populated area. But on the other hand these companies behave so untrustworthily and unethically that it's just plain hard to feel much enthusiasm for the idea on a personal level.

It's not a Wi-Fi access point. It's not really a BLE access point either (which doesn't really exist). Even then BLE is pretty low bandwidth - not enough for any significant internet use.

Basically it just for things like tracking tags and people won't be using your Wi-Fi for internet access.

So they're offering free Prime Music streaming over your neighbour's internet connection. Nice.

Not a problem if the neighbour has a modern and un-metered connection, but not so great when that connection is slower or billed by the megabyte.

Cheers

The Bluetooth SIG defines the Internet Protocol Support Profile (IPSP) over BLE, which from my limited understanding is, simplistically speaking, the main part of a BLE access point (it allows BLE devices to exchange IP packets, and if one end had an Internet connection and appropriate routing, could allow the remote end to have a low-bandwidth Internet connection).

But I have no idea if Sidewalk is using that standard profile, or a proprietary alternative (although I suspect the latter).

Bandwidth-wise, Amazon state:



So as Mark mentioned, not an insignificant amount if you are on a restrictive connection.

Those seem like edge cases. Most connections in the US aren't billed by bandwidth usage as far as I know. I doubt there's many people with these devices who are using those kinds of connections, at least. It would likely just be people using cellular plans for their homes, which isn't common.

Though Comcast doesn't bill by bytes used, they do put a monthly cap on the data usage, and charge as much as $100.00 extra per month if you bust the cap more than once per year. Details here.

Their 1.2TB cap is dangerously low. We are in a household with four work-from-home adults who have a lot of Zoom calls, and we do a lot of video streaming for entertainment. We hit the monthly cap last December when I got a new game console (a bunch of new game downloads), and everyone was doing video calls with their families in addition to their jobs. So now I have several months in which that can't happen again without incurring their extra fee.

So even though I'm not "billed by the byte", I've been given incentive to keep a close eye on my bandwidth usage.

That's true, I'd forgotten about that lunacy. If anything, they seriously should have either raised that cap at the beginning of the pandemic or waived the fees entirely. That's predatory and offensive in the current state of the world.

I get that they don't want people running servers out of their homes but the demands of the average household have skyrocketed in recent years even without pandemic-related activities.

I hate these monopolies.

They did raise the cap at the beginning of the pandemic: From 1.0TB to 1.2TB, and patted themselves on the back for it. Sent us a "look how nice we are" email and everything. When in fact what they're actually doing is merely adjusting their needle to squeeze exactly the right amount of extra cash out of exactly the right customers, without forcing too many to jump ship to their few competitors. I'm in an area where there is a competitor, but my girlfriend has so much other troubles with their service that I'm loath to switch.

That's honestly even more offensive. They know exactly what they're doing there. There's absolutely zero excuse for that. People weren't spending 20% more time at home during this and they know it.

Even with that cap, I got hit in Nov when I got an XSX and PS5, loaded them both up, then the XSX died and I had to send it in, they sent me a new one, so I had to reload it all.

Thankfully, they have a one time get out of jail free card. Since that was my first time busting the cap (by almost 1T), I didn't get charged.

Edit: This is with Cox. I think they increased to 1.5T during the lockdowns.

Yep, that is exactly the same situation I had with Comcast. The only difference is their new cap was 1.2 instead of your 1.5. I, too, get the one-time get out of jail free card, but now I have to wait until next December before I can bust their cap again. Interesting that they gave you 1.5; I don't think I would have busted the cap Comcast had deigned to give us 1.5.

I wonder if all the other folks getting new game consoles over last Christmas season had the same exact problem?

Are you speaking of Ziply? If so, that's who I, and half the folks at my company use. It's been as solid as Frontier's FiOS service was, which we wouldn't have switched from, had Ziply not bought them out). We did have a few hiccups upgrading our service from 5/15 to 100/100, and one time some tech accidentally unplugged our fiber at the substation (or whatever it's called), but that's been it. Oh, and our ONT died once -- but you can't really blame that on them. Best yet, there's no data cap, no throttling or any of the other shenanigans. The kids never missed a day of zoom school.

Alas, no. Here in Seattle our choices are Comcast and Qwest. Or whatever their current fancy new names are. I've encountered troubles with both of them.

Qwest is now Century Link. I had Cox, but there was a problem with my service and my connection would die every day for like 30 minutes, then the modem would have to reboot and it was good for another day. They couldn't fix it and it finally irritated me enough to drop them and go to (then) Qwest.

The service was good, but the speeds were slow. Then my two year price guarantee ran out and it was more expensive than Cox's much faster service. They extended my price for a year, then tried to raise it again, so I dropped them and went back to Cox.

So far Cox has been ok, except for OCT - DEC when the service would randomly go out for hours at a time. They blamed it on all the people working from home, but that has been going on for over half a year at that point.

My girlfriend just bought a new house where the only service is CenturyLink's 10mbit down and 1mbit up or some company I never heard of that has some kind of wireless connection (a few houses have dishes pointed south, but lower than a satellite connection would be). She is going to wait until Starlink is cheaper, out of beta, and has hardware that won't die here (apparently the receivers shut off when they reach 117F) and go with that.