Comment by Mandatum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mandatum | Hacker News Reader

Bad internet speeds, WiFi or business skimping on internet. It's never usually the terminal, it's the connection to their payment provider, or their payment provider reseller's connection to THEIR payment provider.

It's very common for bars and restaurants to have a dedicated line for the terminal, but usually they'll skimp on tech (have seen dial-up over POTS or in a fibre-capable premises). Also very common to use 3G or 2.5G.

It'd take a tech all of 5 minutes to diagnose and suggest a fix for 98% of these slow terminals. It's strange seeing businesses not look to fix these issues. If I was a payment provider I'd probably run diagnostics against my customers terminals every day and force poor performing customers to have someone come in and fix it.

Your conjecture doesn't address why the swipe is fast while the chip is slow.

It certainly does. Swipes are settled (transmitted to the bank) once a day, after store closure. The chip, meanwhile, is in almost all cases online - which means that when the terminal is connected via POTS or ISDN, there is a minimum delay of 10-30s for establishing the connection, while this is nearly instant with a DSL/fiber uplink.

This. Sorry, I thought this was a given. Thanks for filling in the blanks mschuster91.

This is not remotely common in the US. Almost all transactions are on-line, issuing an auth against the card.

You are correct that end of the day batches then happen to settle all those auths into actual sales - but that's so you can do things like instantly refund a customer for a cashier fuckup/etc. and not get charged the discount fee both ways like how a regular refund works.

There are no stores simply accepting any/all magnetic swipe transactions and then only at the end of the day figuring out that oops, that card didn't have enough credit available after all.

Not true - the entry mode is irrelevant to whether it is batched or online. In fact it is more likely in modern systems to be the other way around. Chip may use offline, including offline PIN, whereas stripe is nearly always online. Source: 30 years EFT Banking experience, specialising in EMV.

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