What Is Amazon Sidewalk?

Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that creates a low-bandwidth network to keep your smart devices connected. It also lets you quickly add new devices to your smart home setup without going through the entire connectivity process.

Amazon makes Echo smart speakers and Ring cameras. The Sidewalk is a free feature for your Echo and Ring cameras to create a network bridge between the devices and your WiFi router. If your Ring camera is outdoors, your Echo speaker can create a Sidewalk-bridge to help keep your camera online.

However, the Amazon Sidewalk aims to create an entirely smart neighborhood. If your neighbors also have Echo or Ring devices, their devices can use part of your WiFi network if their WiFi is down. Similarly, if your WiFi isn’t working, Sidewalk will keep your smart home online through your neighbor’s network.

Amazon Sidewalk: Online forever

One of the biggest advantages of the Amazon Sidewalk is that it’ll always keep all smart devices online. A stable WiFi connection is one of the prerequisites of owning a smart speaker. If you go offline even for a while, you can’t even voice-operate your smart lights anymore.

This is where this network mesh steps in. It solves the problem of staying online forever. If you’re worried about too much data usage, Amazon has capped the data consumption to 80 kbps, and it’ll never use more than 500MB/month.

The Ecosystem

Sidewalk makes all Echo and Ring devices work in tandem, but that’s not enough. Amazon already has Tile trackers on board to use the network mesh. This means if you lose something outside your home network, other networks can connect to your Tile tracker and tell you where it is.

Sidewalk deploys three levels of encryption to secure the users. It means despite network sharing, your neighbors won’t be able to snoop on your internet connection. However, there are different levels of privacy perils at play here.

While your neighbors may or may not snoop with you, the company has made it clear that it aims to share data collected through Sidewalk with third-party developers. The company’s privacy track record hasn’t been great either. So if you’re thinking of using the feature, do it only if you trust Amazon with your data.

How to turn off Amazon Sidewalk

If you have an Echo or Ring device, the Amazon Sidewalk is active by default. Here are the steps to turn it off.

Open the Alexa app on your phone and select More from the bottom right side. Select Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk > Switch off Amazon Sidewalk and exit the app.

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Amazon Sidewalk FAQs