Demystifying Apple’s iBeacon

Chances are you’ve heard of Apple’s iBeacon. Wisdom of the day has it ushering in a new revolution in smartphone technology. As with everything mobile, the hype surrounding it is pretty intense, but hype isn’t reality. To discover ways your business may be able to take advantage of it -- or avoid getting taken advantage by it -- it’s necessary to take a look at how it really works.

Beacons establish a virtual region around them. When in range, interested smartphones can detect entrance, exit and rough distance to a beacon along with its identifying information with room-level accuracy of about 30 feet.

The term “iBeacon” often gets mixed up with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). iBeacon isn’t BLE, it’s built upon it.

Just like traditional Bluetooth, BLE (marketed as Bluetooth Smart) is a near-range radio communication technology. BLE slims down on the amount of data it can transfer, which saves power. Whereas traditional Bluetooth can transmit audio to your headset yet batteries last days at most, BLE is limited to transmitting small amounts of data like a heart rate from a wrist monitor every few seconds but batteries can last for months -- or longer.

BLE beacon transmissions are like the heart rate monitor, only even simpler. They transmit an identifying code and a smidgen of data about the device over and over again in one direction only. That’s it.

iBeacon is just a beacon specification promoted by Apple, and it’s not the only game in town. There's another by Gimbal, an open standard, and others. The primary difference between them is the format of the identifying code that’s transmitted.

While the functionality of beacons is simple, by recognizing and looking up other information based on identifying codes received from beacons, apps running on smartphones can do some pretty interesting things. Imagine a retail app automatically showing information on tools when customers walk into the tools department then gardening information when they enter gardening. Or an app that gives workers an indoor map of a production floor, showing their location in relation to other workers and moveable equipment. How about an app that helps riders find buses in a large indoor station; an app that turns lights on when entering a room; or an app that helps you find your car in a parking garage?

Because apps must be able to relate identifying codes with other information, specific beacons are usually related to specific apps. After all, what use would there be in receiving an identification code but not being able to relate it to any other information?

Recent Apple i-devices can receive and decode iBeacons transmissions (and become iBeacons as well), but there are some frustrating limits to what you can do, using the identifier is up to apps, and how iBeacons are managed is up to manufacturers. Although Apple can’t stop newer Android devices from using iBeacons, it’s not sanctioned. So, if you want a more comprehensive solution that includes Android devices it may be worth looking into cross-platform alternatives, Gimbal and Radius Networks as two examples. It’s important to keep in mind BLE beacons are a relatively new technology so it’s probably best to stick with one device manufacturer at this point.

Despite the hype out there, knowing how beacons really work should make it obvious that they don’t talk to heart monitors or handle payments. They're not a way to deliver coupons or a replacement for ‘old’ smartphone location services. They're also not a new way for hackers to control phones. And iBeacon is certainly not the only type of beacon out there -- or necessarily even the best. Yet even after peeling away the misconceptions, iBeacon and others can still be used for some pretty innovative things.