The two things most likely to stop service in a Kenyan restaurant are a power cut and a dropped connection. Both are cheap to plan for.
Restaurants worry about choosing the right software and then lose a Friday night to a router. In Kenya, uptime planning is not an afterthought - it is part of the setup.
Power
A mains-powered terminal, printer and router all stop together in a cut. A UPS keeps them running long enough to either finish service or shut down properly.
What to size it for: your till, your router and your receipt printer. Not the fridge. A 1200VA unit typically covers a small setup for a useful stretch - enough to get through a short outage without turning customers away.
Tablets have their own batteries, which is a genuine advantage during outages. Many restaurants keep one charged tablet as their fallback till.
Internet
Two rules. First, use a proper router, not a phone hotspot, once you have more than one device. A till, a kitchen screen and a printer all fighting over a phone connection is a bad evening waiting to happen.
Second, have a fallback. A mobile router or a phone you can tether from costs little and turns a broken fibre line into an inconvenience rather than a closure.
What happens when you do drop
Ask any POS vendor this question directly and listen carefully to the answer: what exactly can my staff still do if the internet goes down mid-service? The honest answers vary a lot, and it is far better to know beforehand than to discover it at 8pm on a Saturday.
A simple resilience checklist
- UPS on the till, router and receipt printer
- A real router, not a hotspot
- A mobile data fallback ready to switch to
- One charged tablet as a backup till
- Kitchen printer on the network rather than Bluetooth
- Staff who know what to do for ten minutes without the system
None of this is expensive. All of it is cheaper than sending a full restaurant home.
Related reading
Plan for the bad Friday
A UPS, a real router and a fallback connection cost less than one lost evening of trading. Browse routers, UPS and cables.
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