alt Hacker NewsThat's interesting. As the article says, ANT's main use case is in commercial gym equipment. What the article doesn't say is the reason: it excels at gathering data for "group fitness". ANT is a connectionless protocol so in a situation where you have two dozen transmitters and you need to get data from all of them, your receiver simply has to listen and record whatever devices it sees and let the user software (possibly managing a gym leaderboard for a spin class) decide which ones to track.
Contrast with BLE where you would have to make a connection to each device. The overhead of connecting and disconnecting, in addition to being power-prohibitive, takes too long. Some manufacturers have workarounds to enable use of their BLE products in a group fitness environment, but they are pretty much lacking.
It'll be interesting to see how the problem is solved if indeed ANT+ does go away.
BLE could do that too via advertising packets. I don't know if any devices actually do though.
Also the connection process isn't power-prohibitive for BLE, and it doesn't have to take a long time. It's just that most Bluetooth software stacks suck balls. Basically only Apple's is good.
As I recall BLE only supports hosts connecting to 7 peripherals simultaneously which is a bit rubbish, but if you're a gym with some custom ANT+ receiver you can definitely get a custom BLE receiver that can connect to more devices (assuming someone makes such a thing).