Chip and pin: What happens if the internet goes down? Use 3g backup.

Once you have a chip and pin solution integrated with your EPOS software solution which uses verification over the internet, you will soon discover exactly how reliable your local broadband internet connection is.

Most shops use pretty much a domestic broadband internet connection: Either ADSL or cable. The reason for this is cost - packages start from as low as £10 a month and give you pretty much all the internet connectively the average shop needs. However, you do not get a service level agreement with your broadband connection. When you start using all day long on a business critical process like taking credit card payments via your chip and pin terminals, you will discover it is not a perfect service.

Most of the medium sized retailers I know have a issue with their broadband at least once a month. Most of these interruptions are pretty short - but even a 10 minute interruption of service on a saturday lunchtime will have some horrific consequences for the queues at your tills. If the internet connection stops working, there is a pretty good chance that your chip and pin machines will stop working. It is not unusual for domestic broadband services to go "down" for a day at a time!

Offline chip and pin transactions

What can we do? The first thing to consider is your chip and pin solution's capacity for taking offline transactions. What this means is that the chip and pin machine checks the pin number is correctly entered, and saves the transaction to be submitted to the bank when the internet connection comes back up again. The clear disadvantage of this is the risk - no check is made that the card is stolen, and no check is made to see if the funds are available! Whilst this is an acceptable solution if you are doing a lot of low value transactions, it will be an unacceptable risk to retailers in higher value transaction vertical markets such as electrical goods.

3g Internet Backup

The best solution is to get an additional internet connection. It is fairly pointless to get a second broadband connection, because if one supplier has gone "down" then maybe all of them have because it is an issue at the BT exchange. What you need is a 3G mobile internet connection. This is the technology used by modern mobile phones and similar devices to give you a fast internet connection where ever you happen to be.

Just because your shop isn't mobile, it doesn't mean you can't have 3G internet connection. Any computer retailer will sell you a 3G "dongle" to plug into a USB slot on your computer - this will connect over the airwaves via 3G to give you an internet connection. So the solution is fairly simple - if the main shop broadband connection fails, simply plug in the 3G dongle to the computer and it will start to use the 3G internet connection for chip and pin verification.

Note that it is important to make sure the 3G dongle is always working - you need to get a 12 month package, there is no point having a 3G package where the online service expires in 30 days!

If your shop has a number of tills using chip and pin, then it becomes expensive to provide individual internet 3G dongles for each till. It is possible to buy broadband routers that accept a 3G dongle and will automatically switch over to the 3G internet if the broadband fails.

In summary, if you have a chip and pin solution which authorises the transaction over the internet, you need to think about what happens when the internet stops working. If you have low value transactions and a chip and pin solution with a facility for offline transactions, this is probably good enough. If you have high value transactions, think about a backup 3G internet connection for your shop.