Hi,
Nothing precludes ANT from being used as a beacon/location tracking technology from a technical standpoint, and it does have it's own unique benefits.
ANT supports proximity pairing and RSSI which can be used to help determine relative distance. ANT "beacons" or master channels are fully bi-directional with every message which reduces latency and ANT master channels automatically organize themselves using isochronous adaptive transmission allowing large topologies to be formed without using large amounts of processing resources or developer effort.
There are certainly companies which use ANT for positioning/beacon like applications, but do not necessarily promote their use of ANT in marketing.
Berg Liquor Controls for example uses ANT to manage a liquor control system and manage hundreds of bottles concurrently in a bar setting for example.
There was recently an
announcement of deploying ANT in self-forming/self-healing networks as well.
If you wish to find out which companies are using ANT, the
ANT+ Members list is indicative of larger companies which do so.
Cheers