Wired reports on both Sidewalk, Amazon’s new low-bandwidth long-range wireless networking protocol, and Apple’s new position- and distance-measuring U1 chip (mentioned in a recent keynote).
Apple’s U1 chip — which allows precise, indoor positional tracking via the latest iPhones and will power, at the very least, directional AirDrop file-sharing — popped up on screen but was never even mentioned. The interest-piquing phrase “GPS at the scale of your living room” was saved for the online iPhone product pages rather than the bombast of the Steve Jobs Theater… Both Amazon and Apple have the hardware scale to build up the base of access points needed to create a useful network before reaching out to, most likely, iOS developers in Apple’s case, and hardware makers already on board with Alexa in Amazon’s case. For Amazon, in fact, that work has already begun as Sidewalk originally came out of the Ring team’s ambition to extend its connected security devices out into gardens. “Ring lighting was the first time we ran into it as a company, because we wanted to extend out onto the sidewalk,” says Daniel Rausch, VP of smart home at Amazon (which owns Ring).
The smart outoor Ring lights are already out. Products like the Smart Floodlight and Pathlight list a “wireless connection to the Ring Bridge” in the tech specs but eagle-eyed Ring owners had already started to figure out what band Amazon was playing with for this connection, before the Sidewalk announcement. “They’ve been using an internal version of the protocol on the freely available and unlicensed 900MHz part of the spectrum already,” explains Rausch. “What we realised was ‘woah, we can actually do something special’. We can make a version of this protocol which is secure and have this unbelievably ubiquitous coverage if we bring it all together, neighbours and neighbours and neighbours….” An innocent smart dog tracker like Ring Fetch fits perfectly into this model of Amazon-networked communities sharing video, alerts and location tracking.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot