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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? I'd quite like to walk up to my bus stop and have my phone provide me a link to a stop-specific schedule, among other uses.

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But Nextbus already knows what stop you're at using AGPS. What's the point of the beacon? Perhaps you can come up with a use for beacons, but you need to deal with the fact that users don't need or want another intrusive advertising channel.

What if I don't have Nextbus installed, or have location services disabled?

Or even if I have location enabled, what if Nexbus could figure out which stop you're at without having to spin up GPS, in turn saving battery?

Really reaching here. Nextbus is a web app. Location is in my experience always good enough without a sat lock. You don't need "to spin up GPS" to get your answer.

But Nextbus data is not available everywhere - and installing beacons on bus stops to broadcast URL addresses is fairly easy and low cost.

The infrastructure you'd need for your beacons is the same as Nextbus (i.e. trackers on public transport and a city data feed), but Nextbus requires no distributed/deployed devices. Therefore, rolling out a beacon approach must have more overhead than something like Nextbus. You really can't come up with a reason why these beacons are better for that use case.

Hell, just put up a QR code at the bus stop. What could be cheaper than that?

So 3G/4G uses less power than using GPS in a web app? Huh?

Yes, it does, by far in fact. Try turning on an app that requires high precision location values (that's an option to app developers for this reason) and see how long your battery lasts, even with cellular data turned off.

What if I'm in a country without Nextbus?

Beacons are much more precise than GPS. You can setup more than 1.5m accuracy and they can have built-in sensors (e.g. motion sensor). So the signal is broadcasted (URL opened) when you touch something for example.

As you know beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy - it is different Bluetooth and really low-powered. Beacon can last many years on a single coin battery. It's also way more power efficient for the phone to scan for beacons that GPS regions. Beacons have almost no impact on phone's battery.

In addition it is important to remember that 80% of time people spend indoor when GPS doesn't work, so that technology might be useful for indoor applications (e.g. museums, airports, retail, etc).

That's not exactly true. Try adding an app that listens for the iBeacon's specific GUID (but doesn't do anything else, like background app processing when it gets the notification) and then be in a area with lots of beacons with that GUID. You'll notice a difference in battery life without a doubt. That said, if nothing is listening for that GUID, then there's zero impact to battery life.

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