BLE Beacons, Gateways & AoA Positioning

It depends on whether you need continuous location or periodic identification. A BLE beacon carries its own battery and broadcasts on the licence-exempt 2.4 GHz band on a schedule you set, so anywhere you have gateway or AoA anchor coverage the asset reports itself without having to pass a gate — that is what makes it real-time. Passive UHF tags have no battery, run on India's 865-868 MHz band — delicensed by the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules — under EPC Gen2 (ISO/IEC 18000-63, marketed as RAIN RFID), and are only seen when they pass a read point; the read distance depends on the reader, antenna and tag, and is shorter on metal or with a handheld. Passive UHF costs far less per tag, so large populations normally go passive, while BLE suits a smaller set of assets or people you must locate on demand. The comparison at /blog/active-rfid-vs-ble-vs-passive-uhf-rtls/ works through the trade-off.

Work it back from the accuracy you need and your ceiling height. In plain RSSI mode you need one ID-BGW-02 gateway per area you have to be able to tell apart — a room, a bay, a gate — because RSSI gives you a zone rather than a coordinate. For sub-metre work, an ID-AOA-GW25 anchor covers a maximum radius of about twice its install height, so a 3 m ceiling gives at most about a 6 m radius, and anchors are tiled to overlap across a floor. Power and cabling often decide the real effort: the anchor is PoE, while the gateway takes PoE or 6-24 V with Ethernet, Wi-Fi or 4G backhaul, so in an older building the cable runs and spare switch ports can matter more than the device count. Send a floor plan with ceiling heights and the zones you care about, and we will size it against that.

Both routes are open. Every beacon in the range advertises in the iBeacon and Eddystone formats, so an ordinary Android or iOS phone can detect it with no extra hardware — useful for indoor navigation or proximity prompts inside an app you already own, bearing in mind that both platforms put Bluetooth scanning behind runtime permissions the user has to grant, so plan that consent step early. For tracking that does not depend on anyone carrying a phone, the ID-BGW-02 gateway does the scanning itself and pushes detections out over UDP, TCP or MQTT across Ethernet, Wi-Fi or 4G, so your own backend can subscribe to that stream rather than sitting behind someone else's dashboard. Beacon identifiers and broadcast settings are configured with the Identium Connect mobile app, so a tag can be re-pointed on site rather than sent back.

Spectrum and equipment approval are two separate questions. On spectrum, the 2.4 GHz band these devices use is licence-exempt in India for low-power equipment as of 2026, so a beacon rollout does not involve a frequency licence of its own. On equipment, wireless devices brought into India are generally expected to be type-approved or self-certified under the applicable WPC notification, and BIS registration obligations apply to certain categories of electronics, so confirm the current position for your specific import with WPC and BIS or your own compliance adviser rather than assuming, and get the vendor's evidence in writing. One clarification worth making: Identium's RFID readers are BIS and WPC approved. That is passive RFID, not Bluetooth. We claim no other certification for this BLE range. Background at /blog/bis-wpc-compliance-rfid-india-buyers-guide/.

It is quoted against a written specification, because tag count is only one input. The drivers are how many assets or people you tag; whether you need ID-AOA-GW25 anchors for sub-metre accuracy or plain RSSI zoning off gateways, since AoA needs dedicated anchors rather than reusing what a zoning layout already has; battery and target life, since an ER14250 cell (rated up to five years on the L01 and R09 at 0 dBm / 500 ms) or a rechargeable Li-Po badge is a different build from a CR2032 coin cell; sensor variants such as accelerometer or temperature and humidity; IP and impact rating; and the PoE and network work on site. Send tag quantity, floor area, ceiling height, the accuracy you genuinely need and your backhaul, and we will price it. Note that this BLE and AoA range is hardware Identium supplies, while the passive UHF tags and cards we manufacture in New Delhi are priced on their own terms.