Tell me about dongles and back up Internet.

I know they exist but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.
Our credit card terminal plugs into the box in the picture. Today we lost Internet for 10 minutes but I guess it could have been 10 hours.
Losing the credit card machine is definitely a bad thing.
I shall be phoning Virgin up and asking them to provide some sort of back up Internet. Is it just a case of plugging a dongle into this box ?
We can plug the machine into the telephone line but the terminal needs resetting at the other end.

If I were you I would take down that pic ASAP!
Edit: good edit!

Used to have a (relatively) expensive DrayTek router that provided automatic fallback to a 3G dongle, I don’t think most bog-standard ones would have that feature though. Can you google to find a manual for that Hitron thing? Possibly the USB port is just for connecting storage.

Obviously that was a photo I stole off the Virgin website!

Could you just use a regualr 3g dongle – if the broadband fails, you could manualy actuvate the dongle, probably the cheapest way, but an outage would still cost you probably 5mins of downtime whilst you initialise the dongle.

Just get a 3g cc machine

3g cc machine costs £10 a month more. Clunk clunk machine is £1 charge per transaction and takes about 15 minutes on the phone.

3g cc machine costs £10 a month more. Clunk clunk machine is £1 charge per transaction and takes about 15 minutes on the phone.

How long would you need your internet to be down/cc machine down for to loose £10?

£2.50 a week for piece of mind seems like a good deal to me.