Beacon activation range

Hi.

I’m a bit of a newbie when it comes to this, so I’m asking more about “if” question, not “how”.

Let’s say we have eddystone beacons placed near eachother (1-2m).

Can a mobile phone distinguish with high certainty that it’s receiving an url from the closer beacon, not from the one farther away?

Can the mobile phone’s browser “lock out” the beacon that is not the closest one? IOW can the url/beacon itself tell the mobile phone “hey mobile, listen only to me” or would I need a dedicated app for this?

And a few less technical questions:

What about the beacon spam? Say, someone decides to place 10 beacons in one spot, would a user need to go through each prompt on his mobile for each beacon, simply by having his BT turned on?

What about the BT itself - meaning, do you think Google will allow the beacons to be detected even without user actually turning on the BT in the phone? For now it seems to me it’s rather counterproductive to require a native app for each beacon practical application on top of manually turning BT on each time, especially considering that the mobile can detect multiple beacons and not all of them will be the ones the user is turning his BT on for.

Will the users require McDonnald app for McDonald beacons, and Pepsi app for Pepsi beacons even with eddystone transmitting only an url?

Cheers.

Can a mobile phone distinguish with high certainty that it’s receiving an url from the closer beacon, not from the one farther away?

If we’re talking 1–2 m between the beacons, then this will be very hard to do, since the natural variation in the signal strength will likely exceed the expected loss in the signal strength over a distance of 1–2 m.

Can the mobile phone’s browser “lock out” the beacon that is not the closest one? IOW can the url/beacon itself tell the mobile phone “hey mobile, listen only to me” or would I need a dedicated app for this?

I’m not aware of any browser that’d work like that/allow that.

What about the beacon spam? Say, someone decides to place 10 beacons in one spot, would a user need to go through each prompt on his mobile for each beacon, simply by having his BT turned on?

If we’re talking about the Physical Web here, then:

  • on iOS, if you’re using the Chrome widget: that widget is showing only top X URLs, and then you can tap it to open Chrome app itself and show all the URLs
  • on Android, AFAIR there’s a single “low-priority” (i.e., it doesn’t make a sound/buzz the phone) notification, which says “There are URLs nearby”, and when you tap it, it opens Chrome with a list

What about the BT itself - meaning, do you think Google will allow the beacons to be detected even without user actually turning on the BT in the phone?

AFAIK, in Android 7, there’s a separate “Nearby on/off” switch in the control panel, so you can have Bluetooth disabled for apps, but Nearby (which uses Bluetooth) will still use Bluetooth.

Thanks for answering, I have much clearer picture now.

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