Verizon Outages Strand Lower Manhattan Businesses 4 Months After Sandy[telecom]

What, exactly, does Verizon have to do with accepting credit cards? It's not like Verizon is the only way to get an Internet connection in lower Manhattan, particularly for something as low-bandwidth as credit-card transaction processing. (Hell, Verizon's own wireless joint venture can probably provide sufficient network for that.)

-GAWollman

There are numerous options available for businesses in that area to set up for credit cards. Their decision to hold off on implementing any of them is their own choice.

Just as one of many examples there's the "Square Up" system which workd fine in any of the post-Sandy area with cell coverage.

One of the businesses I frequent was still blacked out and operating only during "sunlight hours", but was handling credit card transactions through them.

(I actually brought these folk a 6 kw generator and lots of gasoline after a couple of days of the blackout, so they had power about a day before Con Ed re-lit the area).

But yes, there are credit card options a'plenty.

Many credit card readers/validation boxes tied to registers still use phone lines to callup and validate things. My favorite lunch place is such a thing, and they have to wait sometimes until their one phone line clears up to charge cc's as the customers line up.

Yes, there are many other solutions. But the tech is old, and unless they are willing to think beyond what they currently have, they most likely just sit and grumble. (probably the impetus of lack of change is the only reason the ILECs still have 80% of their business as it is. :)

Simple - credit card terminals process everything over a telephone line. Now in my case I have Square on my cell phone so an outage like that wouldn't impact me.

But a lot of businesses run either stand alone terminals or integrated POS solutions that depend on wireline communication, be it POTS or over the net. Without both you're up the creek without a paddle.

I haven't seen one of those in a really long time. All the ones I've seen lately are IP, not POTS. I assume (hope!) they have some sort of integrated VPN that connects directly to their processor's network.

-GAWollman

In the boonies of Southern Maryland, one restaurant still has the credit card machine attached to the voice (POTS) line. If anyone is gabbing one the phone the machine won't work. Mark L. Smith snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

:>Simple - credit card terminals process everything over a telephone :>line. Now in my case I have Square on my cell phone so an outage like :>that wouldn't impact me.

:I haven't seen one of those in a really long time. All the ones I've :seen lately are IP, not POTS. I assume (hope!) they have some sort of :integrated VPN that connects directly to their processor's network.

Lots of pots terminals around. Plenty of places with no IP connectivity need to accept credit cards.

I do wonder, though, how much of the non-rush to fix the ability to accept cards is because they don't really want to take them. For a lot of businesses, the cost of credit cards is much higher than the cost of cash. Taking cards is worthwhile for them in goodwill, or because they're likely to lose sales. Sandy gives them an excuse to blame...

PCI/DSS requires the PAN data to be transmitted over encrypted networking when over any sort of WAN or wifi what-so-ever. So, it almost certainly is. Although SSL encryption is good enough to comply with this requirement for a gateway processor to get the OK on a charge.

Its the large retailers that do bonehead things that worry me (ie. TJ Max storing all credit card swipes in their database in the clear for years and years with zero reason for this at all).

It's not just in the boonies. Lots of small businesses don't want to pay for an extra phone line of any sort. This happens im doctors' offices and some small retail stores, too.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Many of those places also have a fax machine. I've saved a bunch of them money by explaining they can hook up their credit card dialer-outer onto the fax machine phone line (which, for most of them, is minimally used).