Amazon Opens Its Low-Bandwidth, Long-Range Sidewalk Network To Developers

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2019, Amazon announced Sidewalk, its low-bandwidth, long-range wireless network that uses the 900 MHz spectrum to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It does this by creating a mesh network between Amazon's own Echo and Ring devices and sharing a small part of their owner's bandwidth. Ideally, this means Sidewalk will be able to connect devices that sit beyond the reach of a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signal. Until now, though, only a select number of developers were able to build applications for the network. But that's changing today. The company is now shipping software and hardware development kits, as well as an easy-to-use test kit to test the available Sidewalk connectivity in your neighborhood. Using the new test kit, developers will be able to check their local signal strength on a map to get a better sense of whether their devices will be able to connect to the network before they start working on a product. Amazon sent me one of these Ring-branded devices to try. Getting started with it involves little more than powering it up (it does have a battery for mobile usage) and logging into Amazon's web-based Sidewalk coverage service. From there, you can quickly see all of the raw data from the GPS-enabled test kit and get access to Amazon's U.S.-wide coverage map. To ensure user privacy, the coverage maps only show coverage within a 900m-by-900m square area. You will be able to see the exact location of your own device, but not other devices that report into the coverage map.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.