Amazon's IoT beachhead in homes

Without warning, in June 2021, Amazon notified customers of Alexa, Echo and Ring devices that they had just one week to opt-out of a bold scheme to blanket much of United States with a private mesh wireless network employing WiFi, Blueeooth, and 900 Mhz communications. With a limited bandwidth of just 80 kbps, the network is intended to serve as a springboard for extending home automation and object tracking through the company's Tile tag product into surrounding public spaces.

This points towards a future where big internet platform companies aggressively seek to leverage existing assets in the physical world to create new, private IoT platforms, offering limited details on the underlying design and operation and often with little concern for consent, abuse, and other concerns—and restricting access to devices controlled by the company.