Proactive Retail Support: Keeping You Connected, Keeping You Trading

As a proactive IT support partner for some of the biggest and best retail and hospitality brands worldwide, it's our specialist technical teams that ask the right questions, have an analytical and process-oriented approach, whilst ensuring a positive and optimistic attitude to creating solutions to your problems.

We have been supporting retail and hospitality brands for over 20 years and we know that downtime in-store can keep you from doing what you do best, serving your valuable customers!

When your store goes down, not only do you lose valuable revenue, you run the risk of damaging your brand.

We know that uptime is key, and that's why it's our mission to keep retail and hospitality brands trading at all times.

Keeping you connected with a leading 4G/5G failover solution

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As a leading partner of Cradlepoint, we support our retail & hospitality customers with a 4G failover solution that acts as a backup to mainline connectivity.

4G and soon to be 5G cellular technology is going to be key to giving retail & hospitality businesses reliability and control that will support their IoT devices in-store.

Regardless of industry or location, every business needs to strategically and proactively plan for network failover. When connectivity goes down, Point-of-Sale (POS) services, business operations, profits, and even customer satisfaction suffer.

KFP take a proactive approach to technical support that will ensure we are able to consistently monitor your network connectivity.

See the considerations we take when thinking about failover in-store below.

Here are six key factors to consider regarding failover for your business.

Organisations that may not have the resources to overhaul their new network architecture can instead implement overlay failover with their existing infrastructure as a simple, cost-effective solution. Cradlepoint’s ARC CBA850 bridge converts LTE broadband to Ethernet by providing the existing wire-line router with a second “wired” WAN connection.

Overlay failover increases reliability without relying on last-mile connectivity via the same trench. It’s easy to set up as well; IT staff can simply plug in the router and configure remotely with NetCloud Manager (NCM), the network management service within Cradlepoint NetCloud.

Multiple parts of a network can fail, so it’s important to deploy different types of redundancy. If your wired WAN connection goes down, you can failover to LTE. In the event that your router goes offline, you can take advantage of a second, parallel router using Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP).

Many businesses are simultaneously exchanging multiple types of data, such as sales information, voice and video data, and inventory, often at peak times. LTE failover is ideal in the event that your primary WAN connection goes down, but why not utilise the extra bandwidth all the time?

LTE is incredibly powerful because it supports high bandwidth, which your business can benefit from by utilising LTE failover for load balancing. Critical traffic can be sent across LTE while public traffic can be routed through a land-based connection. In the case of an outage, public WiFi can simply be shut off to preserve critical services, thereby ensuring failover when you need it while expanding bandwidth when you don’t.

At first glance, 99.5% uptime sounds impressive — until you realise that the missing 0.5% equates to four hours of downtime for your store (s) each month. If your business has multiple locations, that downtime can become very expensive very quickly.

A multi-WAN solution can boost that uptime to “four-nines” uptime, or 99.99% solution. With multi-WAN failover and several failure detections and decision algorithms, Cradlepoint provides flexible and robust failover and failback. Cradlepoint offers best-in-class mechanisms that allow you to pick which WAN source to use and can handle advanced multi-WAN management.

Future-proofing your network is a smart investment now and in the future. Ensuring that what you buy today is adaptable to what is released tomorrow can be an extremely important — and financially responsible — element of your network failover solution.

Cradlepoint, for example, connects into the CBA850 device and other Cradlepoint routers, which offers a turnkey networking solution for best-in-class 3G/4G/LTE. When the next generation of LTE modems is released, businesses can take advantage of only upgrading the MC400 modem portion of the product instead of the entire router.

KFP work tirelessly by proactively monitoring your network connectivity via the NetCloud portal. Speak with one of the team today to discuss how we can proactively monitor your retail estate, and ensure you are able to trade at all times.

sales@kfpit.com | +44 (0) 1235 539101 | www.kfpit.com