Amazon sidewalk [1] has entered the chat. The article focuses on "neighbors" but I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...

> I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

I highly doubt that. Rolling out this network is a lot of work and I'm nearly 100% certain this is to reduce claims of non-working devices caused by bad WiFi, plus maybe the option to sell network access on a wide range of devices.

Avoiding blocked network for TVs and other "smart" appliances is surely a nice benefit, but I doubt even 1% of people actually block network access (hell, most probably want it!). There's no way Amazon would pour that amount of effort into extracting that minuscule piece of tracking data.

Thanks for posting that. I was trying to remember what it was called and couldn't.

I once moved across the ocean and newly purchased LG TV refused to work because I am now in the wrong region. Off it went to a landfill, this perfect piece of hardware :-(

Refused to work on what way?

There was a dialog window with a error message and a [Continue] button which did nothing.

Wow, that's terrible.

I only know about LGs but they have a service remote that you can use to change the region. Maybe Samsung has a similar thing?

Unbelievable. Not even as a monitor?

How did it know?

I guess it picked up my ip address.

Might have picked it up from the SSID.

This distopyan deal is surely coming soon. And unfortunately may apply to far more type of stuff we take home.