What Are Beacons, Anyway? - sahajss/knowledge_base GitHub Wiki

What are beacons anyway? iBeacons. BLE beacons. Eddystone. Estimotes. Bluetooth beacons. Chances are you’ve heard of one of these things, even if you don’t know quite what they are or what they do.

Basically, it’s a tiny piece of hardware designed to get glued on the wall and sit there for 1–3 years, broadcasting away for any phone that cares to listen. An important distinction: a beacon is NOT a transceiver. The hardware broadcasts data only. The beacon itself is essentially blind.

 As for what to broadcast, there are some options. Here are the two most common packets:

1. iBeacon, or Estimote: This packet is one of the smallest and easiest to understand. It’s the packet used by official iBeacons and default Estimotes. It’s really simple: three numbers. Two programmable numbers, called major and minor numbers, and one unique identifier. The major and minor numbers are usually configured by the engineer to tell something about the location, for example, each Macy’s department store location might have a different major number, and individual sections within the store would have different minor numbers. 
2. Eddystone-URL: This open format from Google is a little more versatile. Instead of programmable numbers, this packet has a unique ID number and a programmable URL field, which could be a web address, a deep link into an app, or just a text string. For example, the beacons by the cash register could broadcast a link to the “Payment” section of the department store app, while the beacons near the entrance would broadcast coupons and offers.

Every time beacons get press, it’s full of ideas and implications about the potential of beacons. But where are the stories about actual implementations of BLE technology? There’s a huge barrier to entry with the administrative and technological difficulty of deploying the beacons and developing an app. The hardware and protocols are still new, and there isn’t really an easy way to get started if you’re not already a developer.

Additionally, Wi-Fi access points can serve as a pre-existing substitute if the end goal is analytics. Wi-Fi analytics can track unique visitors in a larger range, doesn’t require the user to have an app installed, and for most businesses, only requires an install of commercial software on pre-existing hardware.

For these reasons, beacons are not as popular yet as they conceivably will be in the future. However, it’s not impossible. One shining example of a wildly successful large-scale beacon project is the work done by VenueNext at Levi’s Stadium, the site of this year’s Super Bowl. The entire venue is seeded with thousands of devices that, for users with the stadium’s companion app, can answer questions like Where’s my seat? and Where are the shortest lines? While this is incredibly cool and the stadium’s revenue has increased since the completion of the project, it has yet to be duplicated and the barrier to entry remains high.

I wish you the best of luck if you’re pursuing your own project with Bluetooth beacons! Feel free to reach out to me with any comments or questions at [email protected].