As exchange for their otherwise unpaid service from those devices, they're using a fraction of your potentially capped internet if you happen to be in a market with such poor competition and/or poor regulatory environment that your service is capped.
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.”
Whether it’s capped or not is irrelevant. It’s still taking advantage of a paid resource without explicit permission. Also if it leads to increased demand across an ISP it will inevitably cause higher prices.
Would love to see a source to back this number up if you have one. I had caps on almost every ISP I had in Europe, but even out in the boonies here in the US I've only seen caps on one (unfortunate) connection.
And is also subject to radio airtime fairness rules in ISM bands, meaning the radio cannot be transmitting more than 1% of the time based on jurisdiction.
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.
I wonder how far you could mesh up the east coast, if you had mesh devices in every home, and what the round trip time over that range would look like if you're hitting a device every hundred feet or so.
I don't think something like that is possible. Without a centrally accessible authority, you cannot efficiently route data. Which is important with how low bandwidth something like LoRa is (and even Wifi may not have enough range/bandwidth). I don't think mesh can scale up like that.
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.
