Delivering LPWA Coverage via Smart Homes

Among a slew of smart home product announcements at this fall’s Amazon’s Devices & Services Event, one initiative stood out. Although the addition of Alexa to a slew of new devices was front and center, the announcement that Amazon will launch a pet tracker device and services seemed a little less enticing. However, the planned offering—dubbed Fetch—could be the foundation of a revolutionary change of direction within the smart home market, but one that will require years of investment and commitment from Amazon.

Fetch is set for launch next year. The small Fetch device clips on to a pet collar and enables location tracking for the pet outside the home up to 1 km away. End users can set a perimeter and receive alerts if the device passes through the perimeter. Further out, triangulation capabilities within Sidewalk will allow tracking outside the perimeter with real-time locating capabilities. According to Amazon, 700 Fetch devices are already being tested by Amazon employees in California. Amazon is also looking to Fetch to serve as a reference design to demonstrate the potential that devices to customers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

What is fundamental about the service is the underlying communications technology it will leverage. Amazon Sidewalk is a low-bandwidth, low-power Internet of Things (IoT) network in 900 Mhz spectrum that will have the potential to connect to myriad sensors and other low-cost consumer devices around the home, which is valuable for a company that has been extending its smart home offerings to devices at the perimeter of a home including outdoor cameras and lighting.

The company says it is leveraging the technology to extend home connectivity “past the front door.”Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are both limited; with Amazon Sidewalk, customers will be able to place smart devices anywhere on their property and know they’ll work well, even in dead spots where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth don’t reach.

Although Sidewalk was announced as a new strategy, Amazon is not new to commercializing Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking. Its Ring smart home business launched a range of wireless-connected outdoor lights at CES in January 2019. The range included a Smart Lighting range that also uses 900 Mhz to connect to the Ring Bridge. Additional devices including the latest generation Ring Floodlight Camera and Ring Spotlight Cameras use 900 MHz connectivity.

Details of Amazon’s Sidewalk technology remain limited. While Amazon is suggesting a connection range lower than most LPWA offerings, it is unclear if those signals are encumbered by emanating from inside homes, which would reduce Sidewalk’s expected range if it were built upon an existing LPWA offering. It may also suggest that, given that it is a mesh networking protocol, Amazon may be looking to 802.15.4g, a standard developed for low data rate wireless smart metering connectivity. What is clear is that Amazon could have turned to an array of commercial providers to deliver long-range wireless connectivity including Sigfox, Dash7, LoRaWAN, LTE-M, and Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT). Instead, Amazon has overlaid its own application layer over existing offerings to be in control of the services offered over the network and to maximize its return on underwriting the development and deployment of the technology, though the company has said that it plans to allow third-party access to its proprietary platform in future. 

More details regarding the source of the technology underpinning Sidewalk and the partners set to benefit from Amazon’s Sidewalk strategy will not doubt emerge over time. Assuming it is an in-house development of well-established approaches, what is immediately worth considering is the reach and potential of such a such a project.

Amazon clearly can invest heavily in developing what could be a broad nationwide network. The smart home market has already seen the potential that Amazon innovation and investment can bring to the space. Smart home voice control revolutionized the scale and scope of smart home offerings. Amazon kickstarted that change with its Alexa platform, its heavily subsidized consumer devices, and the reach of its retail operations. Amazon support for Alexa has pushed its technology beyond the range of amazon products—from market-leading Echo devices to the just announced Amazon Echo Frames smart glasses, compatibility with Ring home security products, Amazon Echo Buds headphones, and Amazon Smart Oven—all the way through third-party TVs, automobiles, and much more.

The appeal of LPWA network is in driving enough penetration of network nodes in homes to create overlapping coverage to not just deliver connections from one home to a single device but to enable that single device to be tracked across city- and metropolitan-wide areas through the density of the LPWA nodes in millions of homes.

Amazon cited a recent test of Sidewalk’s potential. Recently, some Amazon employees and their friends and family were part of a test using 700 hundred Ring lighting products that support 900 MHz connections. The devices were installed within days, their individual network points combining 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.

No one is questioning the reach of Amazon’s customer base—certainly not in the United States. The company has sold tens of millions of Echo voice control front-end devices in the United States alone. Amazon also has its eero range of home routers that could also be leveraged to deliver LPWA network coverage. That potential to embed a LPWA radio in its popular devices would not only offer the residents a way to connect to perimeter devices but would hand Amazon a near nationwide coverage network able to support tracking and other services at a cost far below turning to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and LTE and planned 5G capabilities. Better network connectivity can also help keep devices safe and up to date.

Within smart home a variety of wireless protocols including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Z-Wave are already being deployed and leveraged by OEMs and service providers. What LPWA will deliver, besides greater platform complexity from integrating multiple connectivity technologies, is the potential to reach well outside the home to address new applications these shorter-range technologies struggle to reach. This supports the potential for a wide range of outdoor smart home devices and applications including lighting, device/people/pet tracking, sensors to detect weather or gardening conditions, garden irrigation systems, and even perimeter fencing for robot lawn mowers and more. While Amazon will have the potential to target these markets itself, it will also turn to third-parties to leverage Sidewalk for their own applications and for greater consumer understanding these offerings will bring to Amazon and its network.

If Amazon can push Sidewalk into enough devices and homes, it will likely to be able to charge OEMS for access to its network and capabilities. On the device side, Amazon could charge manufacturers for network certification, but a fully managed service wherein OEMs pay for device maintenance, troubleshooting, and Over-the-Air (OTA) upgrades would also likely follow.

While the announcement focused on devices outside the home, Sidewalk could also provide a solution for a range of high-value systems installed in the home that are often in central basements that other technologies might struggle to reach. This stands to benefit OEMs for smart appliances and large equipment such as water heaters and HVAC equipment, all of which have long struggled to get their equipment connected reliably given the limitations of expecting end users and their installers to connect appliances to Wi-Fi and the alternative cost of embedding cellular connectivity with associated subscription fees in their products.

While Amazon Sidewalk is a major new initiative in the smart home market, Amazon is far from the only company looking to leverage access to consumer homes to deliver services outside the home. Comcast, for example, launched its Xfinity Mobile cellular business on the back of shared Wi-Fi access for its subscribers on xFi routers deployed in homes across its U.S. footprint. For its part, Comcast also has its own LPWA strategy, but so far that has remained the preserve of its business network operations.

While Amazon is focused on the U.S. market with Sidewalk, last year The European Commission signaled its intention to designate the 900 MHz band as the default for applications related to smart cities, smart homes, smart farming logistics, transport, and industrial production.

ABI Research has written before about the potential for smart home to be the foundation for a range of smart city applications. Amazon’s Sidewalk is another key example that while top-down smart city projects are typically large-scale top down initiatives, the prevalence of smart home and the ability to leverage consumer systems to deliver resources and data to far wider implementations may provide a quicker, more efficient approach—albeit one under the command of a corporate entity.