> The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what).

IIRC both are true. MB was in development before phones were everywhere, so it's a long time pivot basically.

Also the 2 reasons I've seen that the data was thrown out was not due to use, rather the data was VERY bad / corrupted and not as accurate as they needed.