Amazon released this estimated coverage map Tuesday for its Sidewalk wireless network.

Amazon says its Sidewalk community wireless network, formed by pooling internet bandwidth from users of Amazon devices, now covers 90% of the U.S. population.

The milestone, less than two years after Amazon launched Sidewalk, is a testament to the effectiveness of its controversial approach to building the network. Amazon Echo and Ring devices contribute to Sidewalk by default, securely sharing what’s described as a small amount of bandwidth, unless customers opt out.

Amazon made the coverage announcement Tuesday as it opened Sidewalk to developers to test, create, and adapt devices for the network, taking advantage of development kits and tools from its silicon partners. Up to this point, devices on the network have been developed by Amazon and selected partners such as Tile.

Amazon’s Sidewalk network testing device. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

The company says it will offer free test kits to hardware and software developers to validate its coverage claims. The kits include an oblong Ring-branded device, about 2 inches long and 1 inch tall, that pings the Sidewalk network at regular intervals, and plots the connection strength on an interactive map.

GeekWire has been testing one of the kits for the past several days in Washington state and Northern California. We’ve seen results that match and in some cases exceed Amazon’s estimated coverage map, including low-level connections in rural areas where Amazon’s map suggested there would be no coverage at all.

Announced in fall 2019, Sidewalk is designed to provide connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and other devices, such as yard lights and pet trackers.

Amazon says it aspires to “connect the next billion devices;” using the long-range, low-bandwidth network to fill the gap between traditional home WiFi and the costlier cellular networks that now blanket most of the country.

“It’s a completely new way of thinking about intermediate-range wireless,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in 2019. “There are a lot of things where Bluetooth is way too short-range, WiFi is way too high power, and so to have something that’s still low-power, but that has much longer range, is really a gap in the marketplace.”

People “don’t even realize yet how important that intermediate range is going to be,” Bezos told reporters at the time, in informal remarks after an Amazon event.

Pings from our Sidewalk test device showing the strength of the network in different parts of Seattle.

The company says multiple layers of encryption secure data on the network, protecting the privacy of the customers providing the bandwidth, and those using the network via Sidewalk-enabled devices. Amazon also cites built-in protections to keep customers from exceeding their allotted internet usage.

Sidewalk uses multiple wireless protocols: Bluetooth Low Energy, Frequency Shift Keying, and the LoRa long range, low-bandwidth protocol in the 900 MHz band.

Amazon’s Sidewalk launch in June 2021 sparked a wave of stories telling Amazon device users how to opt out of providing bandwidth to the network, and in some cases explicitly encouraging them to do so.

As part of its announcement on Tuesday, Amazon provided new details about three third-party Sidewalk devices set for release this year:

Nordic Semiconductor, Silicon Labs, and Texas Instruments are offering software and hardware development kits for Amazon Sidewalk. Module vendor Quectel is offering an SDK and a connectivity module for the network. Amazon also offers integration between Sidewalk and AWS IoT Core for access to cloud services.

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