fiveanddime Product Tutorials About Open the app
Tech tip · At the booth

Staying connected at the booth

Every vendor has had the day where the hotspot shows full bars and nothing loads. Big fairs put a few thousand phones on one cell tower and the tower gives up. This page is what to do about it: what keeps working with no signal, what your card reader can and can't do, and the handful of phone tricks that actually help (plus one popular one that doesn't).

Time: 5 minutes to read, 2 minutes to set up before an event Difficulty: Easy Prereq: None

What keeps working with no signal

The short version: fiveanddime keeps running. Cards are the thing to worry about.

fiveanddime lives on your device, not on a server. Your catalog, prices, bundles, and the day's sales are all stored locally, so when the signal drops you keep ringing sales exactly as before. Each sale queues on the device (you'll see the count on the sync chip) and drains to your spreadsheet the moment you're back online. Nothing is lost while you wait, even if you close the app.

These keep working offline:

These need a connection and will wait, or tell you so:

One thing to do before every event

Open fiveanddime once while you still have signal (at home, in the car) and let it pull. That refreshes your catalog and gives the app a full cache for the day. It will run for a week on that cache, so a dead venue is a nuisance, not a problem.

Card readers without signal

Every card reader on the market does the same thing when it loses its connection: it either refuses to take the card, or it takes the card without authorizing it and promises to run it later. There is no third option, because authorizing a card means asking the bank, and asking the bank needs internet.

That second option, usually called offline mode, is the one to understand, because it quietly moves the risk from the processor to you. The customer walks away with the item. You find out hours later whether the card was good.

Square's offline mode

Other processors

The rule of thumb

Treat offline card mode as a small-ticket safety net, not a way of doing business. Set the per-transaction cap around your cheapest big item. Above that, ask for cash or Venmo, or tell the customer plainly that the card will run later and let them decide. And give the phone a chance to reconnect every hour or so (see the airplane-mode trick below) so the queue keeps draining instead of piling up against the 24-hour clock.

Either way, record the sale in fiveanddime as Card the moment you take it. If an offline charge later fails, you'll have the item, the time, and the amount in your Sales sheet to work from.

Getting a connection back

In rough order of how often each one actually works.

1

Airplane mode on, count to ten, off

This is the one to try first, and to repeat every hour at a busy fair. It forces the phone to drop its connection and re-register with the tower, and it often lands on a less crowded slice of it. It also kicks any stuck Square uploads loose. Costs you fifteen seconds.

2

Lock the phone to LTE (turn off 5G)

At a packed venue phones often bounce between a weak 5G signal and LTE, and every bounce drops your hotspot for a few seconds. Locking to LTE gives you one stable connection instead of two flaky ones.

Turn 5G back on after the event. Whether LTE is actually less crowded at a given fair is a coin flip; the stable-connection part is the real win.

About the "drop to 2G" tip you may have seen

It gets passed around vendor groups, sometimes credited to a carrier rep. It's out of date. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have all shut down their 2G and 3G networks, so there is nothing to drop to; turning off 5G puts you on LTE, full stop. (And 2G ran at dial-up speed, so it would not have carried a hotspot anyway.) The LTE trick above is the real version of that advice.

3

Move the hotspot phone

Signal inside a metal-framed tent, behind a wall of boards, or under a stack of bins is worse than signal on top of the display. Put the hotspot phone as high and as open as the booth allows, and keep the devices using it within a few feet. If you're in a building, near a window beats the middle of the hall.

4

Ask about vendor wifi

Larger fairs, festivals, and anything held in a convention space often have a vendor network. It isn't always advertised. Ask the organizer in the week before, and put the password somewhere you'll find it on the day.

5

Split your devices across two connections

If you run fiveanddime on a tablet and Square on your phone, don't route the phone through the tablet's hotspot (or the other way round). Let each use its own data. Then one dead link doesn't take out both the register and the card reader at once. fiveanddime doesn't care either way, but Square does.

6

A second carrier, if this keeps happening

When one carrier's tower is saturated, the other carrier's usually isn't. A prepaid eSIM on a different carrier from your main line (T-Mobile or AT&T if you're on Verizon, and so on) runs $10 to $20 a month, and most current phones let you keep both active and switch which one the hotspot uses. For a vendor doing a dozen big events a year, it's cheaper than one afternoon of lost card sales.

And bring a power bank

A phone running a hotspot, Square, and Bluetooth to a reader all day drains fast, and a phone hunting for signal drains faster. A flat hotspot phone is the same as no signal. Charge everything the night before and keep a bank on the table.

Before-the-event checklist

Checkpoint You know that fiveanddime keeps ringing sales with no signal and catches the spreadsheet up later, that any card taken offline is a card you're trusting rather than authorizing, and that Square's offline mode has to be switched on before the event and uploaded within 24 hours. When the hotspot dies you'll try airplane mode first, lock to LTE second, and move the phone third.

What's next