This week, Amazon opened up its Sidewalk network to third-party developers. They also released the coverage map and claim that over 90 percent of the US population can access the now public network.
First announced in 2019, Sidewalk is a new low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) that Amazon believes will help enable the next wave of connected devices. It’s not designed to replace cellular data for high-bandwidth devices but to be used instead of expensive LTE or 5G connectivity on gadgets that don’t need that much data and where paying $10 or more monthly for data is excessive.
And Quectel announced a partnership to bring advanced connectivity solutions to customers. The Quectel KG100S module and a portfolio of matching antennas will be fully compatible with Amazon Sidewalk. The KG100S is a low-power, cost-effective module in an LGA form factor developed primarily to support Amazon Sidewalk applications.
Why do we care?
There will be a subset of listeners who will hear this story and immediately think about the kinds of solutions they can use this for and which manufacturers they need to get on board. I included Quectel as an example, knowing there are more out there.