Internet went down at an event and couldn’t get into offline mode

[saraEV]

Hello! A few days ago my food truck was at a busy event and the internet went down. We have the Square Register, a usb printer, hooked up to a CSG pro router with Verizon data plan (up until then, extremely reliable). I keep my register up to date and have auto updates on.

This particular event must have been a dead zone, or there were just so many people with cell phones, that our internet went down. The register just was stuck on a white screen, with the black square logo spinning. I was not able to go into my settings and attempt Offline Mode. I couldn’t print tickets or even type in cash amounts. We had to hand write tickets and do the math by hand. It was stressful and embarrassing with a huge line! My question is, how can I make sure this doesn’t happen again? If I was able to enter offline mode, would my printer and cash drawer still work, and be able to type in tickets? Or am I just out of luck, and our scrappy method was our best bet?

[rtfulk · Accepted solution]

@saraEVWe have Verizon business internet and it’s not just Verizon it’s all cellular hotspots. 

Cellular WiFi acts a little different than home WiFi.  When you loose internet on home WiFi the connection drops.   When you loose internet on a cellular hotspot, the hotspot still broadcasts like it’s connected to the internet.  

The white screen you got was the register still trying to connect to the internet thinking it was active. 

One thing that may have worked.  
1.  Turn off the Cellular hotspot.  
2. Restart the register.

When the register is booting backup and doesn’t see a WiFi connection, you could go into settings and turn on offline mode, if you didn’t already have it enabled.  

After that with the printer connected to the register via USB the printer would work as normal.  

[saraEV]

Thank you so much for your reply! That’s interesting about cellular working differently than regular WiFi. I will definitely make note of your idea and try that out if this happens again. Thanks! 🙂

[rtfulk]

The problem with cellular hotspots is that when the network gets overloaded, you don’t always lose the connection completely. The hotspot still shows it’s connected, but the data connection can become so slow that apps stop responding or appear frozen. That’s often worse because you don’t immediately realize the internet is the problem.

With many wired internet connections, if the service goes down completely, devices usually recognize the outage much faster and display an offline message. With a congested cellular connection, the register may keep waiting for data, resulting in a white screen, spinning wheel, or frozen checkout process