Waze Beacons are installed in tunnels, where GPS signal is lost.
The Beacon is a Cost-effective, battery-operated, low-energy micro-controller hardware that sends a one-way signal to a user’s phone or tablet without capturing any information about the user. The signal from each Beacon enables Waze to continue routing drivers and collecting real-time traffic data underground.
Other navigation apps can also use the Waze Beacons program technology for free.
Read the full Waze Beacons product specifications for more info.
Battery usage
Waze Beacons’ impact on battery usage is low. Beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and minimally impact device battery consumption.
The Beacons have a 4-6 year battery life and a 4-year full warranty from Bluvision.
Low temperatures may affect the battery life.
Beacons batteries are not rechargeable and cannot be replaced. When a battery dies, the Beacon needs to be replaced with a new one.
Driver Bluetooth settings
To benefit from navigation through tunnels using the Waze Beacons technology, drivers need to have Bluetooth enabled on their device.
Drivers who have their Bluetooth disabled, will be prompted to switch it on at the start of their drive, if the route provided goes through a tunnel with Waze Beacons installed.
Waze Beacon Collected Information
Waze Beacon transmits the following data:
- Eddystone UID
- Eddystone Telemetry (TLM)
Waze application will collect the following information:
Common to both packets
- Configured TX power
- RSSI
- Timestamp
Eddystone UID
1. UID (16 bytes)
Eddystone TLM
- Battery voltage
- Advertising PDU count
- Time since power-on or reboot
- Temperature
The Waze application will ignore any packet that doesn’t meet the following criteria:
- UID packet that doesn’t contain Waze’s UID namespace (0xEDE5A7B1986E2BE4CA5A)
- TLM packet that doesn’t have a Mac address which corresponds to a UID packet with Waze’s UID namespace
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