Solution for local cafe owner?

[Deleted member 138126]

Hi folks,

My local friendly cafe owner has had quite a few problems with her Internet (BT Business) and consequently her card reader (iZettle), which is pretty frustrating as most people are cash-free these days (including me!). It seems that iZettle has loads of problems working after one of these Internet outages. I haven't had a chance to go and have a look at her setup yet, but in the meantime, question time:

- Have any of you good people come up against a similar problem (for a friend or family), and how did you solve it?
- I'm thinking some sort of 4G backup so that if the main Internet goes down, the card reader can fall back to 4G. EE charge £13 per month for 5GB which would be plenty just for payments.
- But how to implement that backup? Little pocket 4G router that she manually switches on when the Internet goes down? Don't want some complicated router with WAN failover because then all the cafe punters would annihilate her 4G allowance in a matter of minutes. In other words, if the main Internet goes down, then her customers have no Internet, but the card reader still does.
- SumUp has a 3G card reader that costs £69 (one-off) and has no monthly fees, so maybe I'll just tell her to have that as her backup. It has built-in SIM and you don't pay for the data, so I guess they take it out of the 1.75% fee they charge (which seems pretty standard across the various brands I've had a look at).
- In general, have you got experience with any/all of the various card readers (iZettle, Square, SumUp, others?) and have any recommendations?

Thanks folks, I appreciate your time!

 

[BigT]

Well first off if I was subscribing to BT business and getting these outages I'd want them sorted.

Secondly, BT business already offer what you are describing, it is called 4G assure I think: https://business.bt.com/4g-assure/

Thirdly if you had to do it DIY then you can set it up so only the iZettle device fails over. I can't talk about every router out there but on pfSense I'd set up a rule for the iZetlle's MAC address that uses regular internet but fails over to 4G and every other device would be regular internet only, whether it was up or down.

And finally if I wanted to go really ghetto and cheap I'd create a hotspot on my phone, get the iZettle to connect to that and forget about using the regular internet - leave that for the customers. The iZettle can't use that much data to make any dent in a typical mobile allowance.

 

[Terrier_Jimlad]

Not sure it's the best idea to have the iZettle device processing those card and transaction details on the same router/WLAN as the customers, leaving it open to man in the middle attacks by some geek in the corner rocking a kali instance etc?

 

[d_brennen]

A Draytek Vigor router with failover 4G WAN might be an option?

TBH for a small business like a cafe I'd be jumping all over BT to get it sorted, there shouldn't be much need for a failover option

Not sure it's the best idea to have the iZettle device processing those card and transaction details on the same router/WLAN as the customers, leaving it open to man in the middle attacks by some geek in the corner rocking a kali instance etc?

That's iZettle's problem and I'd assume any communication from the handset to the mothership, via the local router is encrypted pretty well

 

[bloodiedathame]

iZettle won't work with unsecured Wifi networks. My wife hotspots the iZettle from her phone.

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Well first off if I was subscribing to BT business and getting these outages I'd want them sorted.

Secondly, BT business already offer what you are describing, it is called 4G assure I think: https://business.bt.com/4g-assure/

Thirdly if you had to do it DIY then you can set it up so only the iZettle device fails over. I can't talk about every router out there but on pfSense I'd set up a rule for the iZetlle's MAC address that uses regular internet but fails over to 4G and every other device would be regular internet only, whether it was up or down.

And finally if I wanted to go really ghetto and cheap I'd create a hotspot on my phone, get the iZettle to connect to that and forget about using the regular internet - leave that for the customers. The iZettle can't use that much data to make any dent in a typical mobile allowance.

Her big frustration is that BT takes ages to sort things out. She mentioned that she had been given the 4G dongle, and said it doesn't work. So I'm going to see if I can get that working.

I don't know anything about these card reading machines, so just want to arm myself with as much knowledge before I go and spend an hour or two (after hours) checking things out and hopefully making some improvements.

One thing I've wondered is whether the BT hub doesn't handle lots of users over time and is just crashing, and maybe switching it to bridge mode and putting in a slightly better router (I have a spare Draytek) would work better. The Draytek allows a scheduled reboot to be setup which might help (e.g. 5 am every day).

 

[Caged]

4G assure with BT is the best way to handle this, would recommend focusing on getting that working before doing anything else too drastic.

Maybe buy a Meraki Go access point to handle the guest Wi-Fi part of things, as that will NAT off the customers and also let you do things like Facebook login.