By Chris Nation
Running late for a restaurant reservation last week and with the fuel warning light on, I pulled in at our local filling station and convenience store. As usual I flipped the petrol cap, climbed out and had my finger on the trigger ready to dispense a tank of diesel when I finally noticed the handwritten sign on the pump: ‘Broadband Problem. We are unable to accept credit, debit cards. Cash only sorry.’
Three days later the same sign was still there, and I can’t begin to imagine how much business was lost, or how many customers inadvertently filled their tanks without cash on them.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad the filling station uses a broadband connection for its payment terminals. The queues are shorter and I spend far less time at the till than before, when their card payment terminals connected over dial-up lines. What I am less glad about is the lack of resilience in the system they elected to use, or which was imposed on them.
It’s easy to forget that when the local broadband exchange that serves our homes goes down, local business connections go down with it.
High turnover businesses like our local filling station should have redundancy built into their systems. In a semi-rural location like ours, connecting to a second ADSL exchange is not possible, and frankly, few businesses would want to pay for a second broadband line in case of emergency anyway.
For these reasons, we developed the 3G variant of our popular Mako 6500 appliance so that a problem with the broadband connection at a business would initiate an automatic and PCI DSS-compliant failover connection using mobile data. Seeing an example of a merchant that could really use such a device drove home the point of how badly such redundancy is needed in today’s retail environments.
Have you ever been frustrated by a broadband outage at a retailer? Let us know in the comments.