Peak trading is the one time of year when your network cannot go offline. From late November to the first week of January, the tills are busier, and more devices are sharing the same line.
The good news is that getting retail connectivity peak season ready is not a big project. It is a series of small checks, most of them an afternoon’s work, that all need doing before the last week of November rather than during it.
Here is the checklist to work through. Tick off what is already sorted, and put a date against anything that is not.
THE DATES TO WORK BACK FROM
- Black Friday — Friday 27 November 2026
- Cyber Monday — Monday 30 November 2026
- Christmas Day — Friday 25 December 2026 (bank holiday)
- Boxing Day — Saturday 26 December, substitute bank holiday Monday 28 December 2026
- New Year’s Day — Friday 1 January 2027 (bank holiday)
Anything that needs a survey, a new connection or a router has to be ordered well before the first of those dates, not squeezed between them. Lead times can vary a lot by site: on-net locations can be live in as little as five working days, but anything off-net can take up to several weeks once surveys and third parties are involved. Check which category each site falls into before you assume there’s time.
1. BANDWIDTH AND CAPACITY
Most retail sites are not sized for their busiest hour. They are sized for the day they were installed.
- Look at your peak hour of utilisation over the last twelve months, not your monthly average. The average hides exactly the hour you are preparing for.
- Count what is actually on the line now: tills, card terminals, guest Wi-Fi, CCTV upload, digital signage, click-and-collect handhelds, stock scanners, staff devices. Signage and CCTV are the two that quietly grow.
- Check whether guest Wi-Fi can starve the tills. If customer traffic and trading traffic share one connection with no prioritisation, a busy shop floor becomes a slow checkout.
- Check the upload path, not just download. Card authorisation, stock sync and CCTV all push data out, and upload is where cheaper connections run out first.
- If you are close to the maximum, look at an upgrade now. An FTTP or Ethernet upgrade ordered in September lands comfortably; the same order in November does not.
2. FIND YOUR SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE
Ask one question of every site: if this one thing fails at 11am on Black Friday, what stops?
- Identify the sites running on a single circuit. That circuit is a single point of failure, however good it is.
- Check whether your back-up is genuinely diverse. A second line that follows the same duct, enters through the same wall and terminates in the same cabinet is a second line, not resilience. Diversity means a different physical path.
- Test the failover for real. Not “confirm it is configured”; fail the primary in a quiet hour and watch what actually happens, before November.
- Time it, and check whether card sessions survive it. Thirty seconds of reconvergence with a queue at the till is a very different experience from thirty seconds overnight.
3. TEMPORARY SITES, KIOSKS AND POP-UPS
Peak is when temporary space gets used: a unit taken for six weeks, a kiosk on a concourse, a pop-up in a car park. These sites carry real revenue and almost always get planned last.
- Start the connectivity conversation as soon as the space is agreed. Fixed connectivity into a temporary unit has the same lead time as anywhere else. Shared centre Wi-Fi is not suitable for card payments.
- Sort power and physical security for the equipment. A router on an open shelf in a pop-up is a router that gets unplugged.
- Agree support terms and a clear point of contact if anything goes wrong. Treat temporary connectivity as a permanent fixture; you don’t want issues becoming unresolvable because they fall between support arrangements.
- Plan the decommission date and equipment return at the same time as the install. Far cheaper than working it out in January.
4. SUPPORT COVER OVER THE BANK HOLIDAYS
Faults do not respect the calendar, and the days you most need someone are the days most businesses are closed.
- Check what “24/7″ means in practice: a UK team answering the phone on Boxing Day, or a queue and a callback.
- Get the escalation path in writing, with names or roles rather than a general inbox.
- Publish an internal contact sheet to store managers: what to check first, who to call, and what information to have ready (site name, circuit reference, what changed).
- Decide in advance what a store can do on its own: switch to back-up, reboot a router, and what needs a call.
- Make sure someone on your side can authorise an engineer visit over the holidays. Cover is worthless if the person who can say yes is unreachable.
5. THE CHANGE FREEZE
The most reliable network improvement available in late November is doing nothing at all.
- Ask your connectivity provider when their change freeze window is, so you know when network changes or upgrades will or won’t be made.
- Confirm the freeze with your connectivity provider so nothing is scheduled into your busiest weeks.
WHAT DOWNTIME ACTUALLY COSTS YOU
As a benchmark: UK businesses are estimated to lose £3.7 billion a year to internet outages, which works out at roughly £5,000–£20,000 for every hour a single store is offline. Black Friday internet downtime sits at the sharp end of that range, not the average. With cash now used for well under half of UK retail transactions, most of that comes down to EPOS and payment terminals going down with the line, which is exactly why sections 2 and 3 of this checklist matter most.
For the full breakdown of what an hour offline really costs, including the recovery tail and the reputational drag, read The true cost of a one-hour outage for a retailer on the Optinet blog.