I paid $200 (although much cheaper now) for my echo years ago. This isn’t a free device and the services it provides cost me actual money to be able to use. Pretty funny to spin this as “you paid $200 for this device, but all the services on it are free.”
I also provide shelter, insurance, cleaning, etc.
I was commenting on how GP called the functions of the Echo “free” when they are certainly not free.
There are a bunch of 1TB caps around, but a cap like that would suggest that the value of 500MB is 3 to 10 cents at most.
Just using 3 watts at idle is already enough to cost the average person 25 cents a month.
I think if people had a better understanding of how LoRa works they'd freak out a little less. This entire thread of comments appears to be mostly based on some substantial misconceptions around the capabilities being surfaced here.
LoRa isn't wifi, enabling LoRa doesn't create an IP attack surface, and the bandwidth is so hilariously low as to be trivial. You can exfiltrate tens to hundreds of bytes with these things.
Link to FAQ: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?node=21328123011
Where do I go to sing up to use sidewalk and cancel my cellular connection? Not having to deal with Qualcomm's stuff would be fantastic.
Something like Meshtastic (FOSS mesh messaging project which uses the same LoRa wireless as Amazon's Sidewalk) blindly broadcasts, and any node that picks up the message repeats it. So with a big enough mesh, you'd use up all wireless bandwidth just repeating messages. Even if the recipient is right next to you.
If you could theoretically build a list of nodes, to efficiently route data by doing a shortest path, at some size the data needed to keep the node list up to date would eat up all the bandwidth. Because like messages in the previous method, every change in the node distance tree would have to propagate throughout the entire network.