We have Spectrum service for our internet at home.

When there is a service interruption, Spectrum sends notifications that they are aware of it, they are working on it, and the expected time that they will be back in service (they almost always beat these estimates).

All of that is great. One minor problem -- these notifications are sent via the internet.

Cox Communications does the exact same thing.

I installed a Cox app on my cell phone and whether the internet is up or not I get the notification.

They always say it'll take an hour or two longer than it does though, good marketing ploy.

Spectrum allows you to select your notification method in your account settings.

E-mail, text message, or a recorded message phone call.
All should work on any smart phone if you still have cell service while your internet is out.

When you try to log on and its not available, call them an professionally and politely demand the day refunded. (Then check your bill to ensure it happened)

In my neighborhood that was happening and through the Nextdoor app, I recommended everyone do the same. Next time service was hit, enough people called that resulted in service disruptions only happening late at night now (unless somebody eff'ed up - like hitting a big metal box with their car)

Their nodes are getting hit so hard via work from home, school from home, streaming, video games, that their nodes are going down and need “adjusting.” Once this bullshit is over expect price increases. There is no free lunch.

My retail store runs on Spectrum.... cash registers, credit card machines and internet.

It was down most of the day today. We can’t ring up a sale without it.

Bad situation, Jeff. Do credit card processing outfits still provide the old-fashioned paper slip thingys, where you put the card and a two or three part paper form in the machine, take an imprint of the card, and fill the form by hand?

Can the registers be operated as stand-alone devices, like an old-fashioned cash register?

Or, are you totally dead in the water?

Kona Hawaii went dead on the net a number of years ago and none of the stores or restaurants could do any debit card or CC business for half a day.

A lot of people got very worried about how they were going to eat.

It's why I carry a fairly large amount of cash when I travel.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
Bad situation, Jeff. Do credit card processing outfits still provide the old-fashioned paper slip thingys, where you put the card and a two or three part paper form in the machine, take an imprint of the card, and fill the form by hand?

Can the registers be operated as stand-alone devices, like an old-fashioned cash register?

Or, are you totally dead in the water?

We have an app we can use on our iPhones and iPads to run credit cards but when service returns we have to manually adjust inventory. It’s a pain.

We do have an old school credit card slider as a backup.

The registers work but don’t communicate with our POS system when Spectrum is down.

Ah, so it sounds like you are able to continue to do business even though your workload with respect to sales has more than doubled and even with careful record keeping for sales, updating inventory is error-prone.

I don't know anything about your system, I'm retired from that stuff now, but in a former life I worked for a consulting company that did stuff like this.

I have to assume that you have considered a system that does all of the inventory adjustment in-house, without depending on an internet connection, and found some reason to go with the internet dependency.