Meraki Dashboard Benefits and Beacon Technology

The Cisco Meraki dashboard can offer your business a variety of different benefits, including greater visibility into your wireless network, simplified troubleshooting to help you cut down on service calls, and advanced analytics tools to help you make smarter decisions about how to run your network. However, among the most valuable benefits that the Meraki dashboard offers is the ability to future-proof your wireless infrastructure. One important way that the Meraki dashboard accomplishes this is through the use integrated access point beacon technology.

In this post, we'll look at Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon technology, and talk about how the Meraki dashboard helps organizations make the most of the technology.

What is Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon Technology?

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a new development to the Bluetooth standard that includes a variety of energy-saving techniques. By operating in a more energy-efficient manner, BLE opens up the possibilities of Bluetooth to a number of new uses where it previously would not have been feasible. Many small devices can now send BLE beacons (very small Bluetooth messages that are transmitted over the wireless network) without draining their limited battery lives.

Each BLE beacon features three elements:

• Universally unique identifier (UUID)
• Major identifier
• Minor identifier

These three elements can be encoded to communicate important information to other BLE devices. For instance, in a retail environment, the UUID could be the brand, while the major identifier could be the store location, and the minor identifier could be the product category. BLE offers a quick and efficient way to send this information from device to device.

What are the Drawbacks to BLE Beacons, and How Does the Meraki Dashboard Address Them?

Although BLE beacon devices do have longer battery lives, they also have to be deployed in very large numbers for organizations to realize the full benefits of the technology. Implementing so many of these devices at once contributes to greater complexity. Due to the large numbers of devices you must deploy, you may find yourself having to replace a significant number of them every week, even with their long battery lives.

This is where the Meraki dashboard can help.The Meraki MR32 and MR72 802.11ac access points both come with integrated beacon technology. By integrating this technology into the AP, the Meraki dashboard allows users to conduct hands-free management and configuration of their BLE beacon devices.

For instance, the Meraki dashboard allows you to set up an entire network of beacons at once, and then update identifiers as needed. As your needs change and grow, Meraki will change your beacon network accordingly, without the problems and complexity that a large network of battery-powered devices would usually give rise to.