I wonder which smart TV provider will be the first to use this instead of home wifi where people can disable or black hole connectivity.
But you have a real point, and AWS already solved that with the 3G enabled Kindles by having carrier agreements. Why not doing that with Smart TVs?
Amazon regretted that pretty soon after they did it, people hacked their kindles to be hotspots and it became an arms race amazon didn't wanna play.
The TV company will deploy base station(s) in my town. Embed SIM cards in TVs they ship. No need to connect to my home WiFi to send personalised data back to their servers, or to upgrade firmware etc.,
Unless I'm misunderstanding how this works, it wouldn't need a base station in your home, just a commodity cellular modem with a network-specific SIM, and an uplink tower somewhere within range.
now they have complete control over the end-to-end, and can cheaply provision sims that only talk to their local tower for example, and reject non-company provisioned IMEI (if they need it anymore?) etc
working on building blocking for this :)
You seem to be interpreting this as "AWS is going to put 5G towers everywhere and smart TVs are going to connect to them to send data they collect!". That's not what this is at all.
This is one of the many reasons it's beneficial to read the actual article/post and comprehend the information, rather than reflexively reacting to keywords you notice in the title.
AWS was one of the companies they were negotiating with - I never realized they had not yet announced this service.
I dont' remember the exact feature name though.
> For device makers, we plan to publish protocols that any manufacturer can use to build reliable, low-power, low-cost devices that benefit from access to long-range, low-bandwidth wireless connections. In the meantime, you can sign up to be notified when more information is available.
So the intention is definitely there that device manufacturers can pay to delvier data over the network.
The idea is to make sure they can keep that data flowing even if someone intentionally disconnects the TV from the internet
Given that there's an extremely simple and straightforward answer to your question (smart TV manufacturers sell data obtained from spying on users, and they need a way to get that data from the TV to their servers), I would encourage you to give some thought before making such an empty and vapid comment about voting habits on HN.
Alternatively, you could maybe do the same to your drywall if you are looking at new home construction... If every room is effectively a faraday cage, you are back in control over what can talk to what on a much more granular level. This clearly creates challenges for your own wireless/mobile signals, but presumably you also have the ability to hardwire additional access points if you are going to this extent.