Ranging an iBeacon latency

Question

I have been playing around with the new iBeacons in iOS 7. I have one device setup as a beacon, and the other device ranging to detect when I am near, far, immediate, etc. I'd like to know very quickly when I cross between these ranges. Is there any way to adjust the latency? I find that I have to move my device around very slowly or I will not know when I cross these thresholds.

Answer 1

No, you would not be able to adjust the beacon latency. As Apple says in Region Monitoring Guide:

To prevent spurious notifications, iOS does not deliver region notifications until certain threshold conditions are met. Specifically, the user’s location must cross the region boundary and move away from that boundary by a minimum distance and remain at that minimum distance for at least 20 seconds before the notifications are reported.

Apple does not define what the latency is, it seems it's not fast enough for your application.

You can have a tradeoff - to implement beacon ranging yourself using Core Bluetooth and listen to the CBPeripheral advertisement events while scanning and range using RSSI:

centralManager:didDiscoverPeripheral:advertisementData:RSSI:

If you are using a custom beacon, such as the RadiusNetworks VirtualiBeacon VM image you can adjust the frequency of the advertisements. The flip side your app must run in the foreground opposed to CoreLocation delivering beacon events even when your app is not running.