Frequently Asked Questions

Beacons are just transmitters. They do not receive or collect any signals from mobile devices. These devices don’t detect the presence of a shopper’s mobile device and therefore have no ability to track his/her location.

The relevant app on a mobile device is actually what detects the beacons. More specifically, an app installed on the mobile device can ask to be notified when the device nears a specific beacon. This works very similar to how geofences work when a mobile device crosses into a specific geographic location.

All Android phones and iPhones with beacon scanning functionalities receive notifications. Some businesses keep other apps from accessing its beacons’ location data by letting only authorized apps interact with their beacons. This allows them to maintain a closed network of apps that can interact with their beacons.

Most beacons today, however, are “open network,” meaning their unique identifier is publicly available for developers. This is so that third-party developers can create in-store apps that will work with their beacons. For example, a mall may let each store inside it access public beacons placed in the mall.

Beacons can be placed outdoors, however, temperature affects battery life. Some beacons are also waterproof so they can be placed outdoors. External environment changes such as rains can reduce the range of the signal through. Check out the long-range beacons and outdoor beacons.

Though it depends on the intended use and immediate surroundings too, generally one could detect the presence of beacons as far away as 50-70 meters or as little as 10 inches, so it is very accurate. Given its accuracy, beacons can be used in store aisles, museums and car dealerships where business owners want to talk about a specific product or model.

The typical range of Bluetooth low-energy radio modules is up to 70 m (230 ft.). It depends on the location too, because radio signals can be absorbed or diffracted. The smallest beacon form factor, keychain beacon has a maximum range of 25 meters and whereas the long-range beacons have a maximum range of 300 meters.

Barriers to wide adoption of BLE beacon technology are:

a) Several layers of security: customers have to turn on their mobile phone’s Bluetooth, allow location services detection through the relevant app and opt-in to receive in-store or indoor notifications;

b) Myths about privacy: A lot of customers today are still wary of being ‘tracked’. Retailers could be concerned about data theft from beacons. In reality, the beacons just pass the information along to the cloud, they don’t store anything

Most beacons have a battery life of two years as the energy consumption is really low. The battery is generally non-rechargeable and needs to be replaced.

Beacons require development efforts if you want to buy beacon hardware from an online store and then want to build an app to receive beacon notifications. However, with beacon manager apps and platforms you do not need developers. You can create and assign campaigns to beacons using platforms like Beaconstac.

A beacon manager app or cloud platform allows marketers and business owners to configure and manage a fleet of beacons remotely. As a part of configuring and managing you can rename the beacon, adjust the hardware settings such as transmitting range and interval, monitor the beacon status and battery life, toggle Physical Web notifications.

Captive Audience’s cloud platform is an example of a beacon manager. It allows doing all of the above and more. Captive Audience Technology allows you to monitor and configure your fleet of beacons remotely, via the cloud platform or a beacon manager app.

In terms of range, beacons function in the interim of NFC (too narrow) and GPS (too broad) ranges, and that is what makes it more effective than the other two.

They are ideal for detecting smartphones indoors, where GPS isn’t always effective and can communicate with apps on devices when they are indoors.

Beacons are low-cost, low-powered transmitters equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE (also called Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart) that can be used to deliver proximity-based, context-aware messages.

A beacon transmits signals which allow another device to determine its proximity to the broadcaster. In a store, a beacon lets a customer’s app determine that it’s close to a particular aisle, or in a particular department. The beacon doesn’t transmit content, it simply transmits a signal that lets a user’s phone or tablet figure out what its proximity is to the beacon.

The terms iBeacon and beacon are often used interchangeably. The main difference is that iBeacon is not a physical product, it’s a technology. It’s a trademark of Apple for their future BLE products and systems for proximity marketing. It is a system built into the latest version of Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating system that lets iPhones and iPads constantly scan for Bluetooth devices nearby; they can also emit beacon signals to wake up apps on other iOS devices.

Bluetooth Low Energy (also called Bluetooth 4.0 or Bluetooth Smart) is the specification for the type of signals that beacons transmit. Bluetooth LE has the advantage that it is low energy and is ‘native’ to most modern phones and tablets.