Your internet connection is the least reliable part of your resort. We designed around that.
Heavy snow, remote terrain, and a single uplink are a bad combination for anything that has to keep running at the register. So the register doesn't depend on the uplink.
The cloud isn't in the critical path for a sale
A small on-site appliance — the edge gateway — sits at your resort and is the only thing your registers, timeclocks, and gate scanners talk to directly. It keeps a local copy of what it needs to keep operating, and it's the sole link back to the cloud. When your internet connection drops, the terminals don't notice: they keep talking to the edge gateway on the local network, the same as always.
A sale, a clock-in, or a ticket scan during an outage isn't a failure state — it's the normal path. The edge gateway records it and reconciles with the cloud the moment connectivity returns.
Starlink helps. It isn't the whole answer.
Satellite internet solved the "no fiber up the mountain" problem, and it's a real improvement over what came before. But it's still one uplink — and heavy snow load, obstructed sky view, and severe weather are exactly the conditions a ski resort gets the most of, and exactly when satellite links are most prone to degrading or dropping.
The honest answer for most mountains is two links, not one. Satellite and fixed wireless fail for completely different reasons — a dish loading up with snow has nothing to do with a line-of-sight radio, and vice versa — so one covers the other. The gateway doesn't care which one is up, or whether either is.
Satellite
Works almost anywhere with sky view, which is why it ended the fibre problem. Degrades under heavy snow load and obstruction, and business plans meter your priority data.
Fixed wireless
A line-of-sight radio to a regional tower. Usually cheaper, usually flat-rate rather than metered, and unaffected by the weather that troubles a dish — but it needs the sight line.
Cellular
Fine as a third path where there is coverage. Rarely the primary at elevation, but a perfectly good way to keep the sync queue moving.
Uplink-dependent setup
If the satellite link drops, cloud-only POS and timeclock systems stop taking sales and stop tracking hours — right in the middle of your busiest, worst-weather days.
Snow Peak Systems
The edge gateway keeps the register, timeclock, and gate scanning running locally regardless of what the uplink is doing, and syncs when it's available again.
We don't replace your internet connection — satellite, fixed wireless, fibre, cellular, or two of them side by side, all work fine as the edge gateway's link to the cloud. We just made sure a bad day for that link isn't a bad day for your front desk.
Up there, you pay for that link by the gigabyte
This is the part that doesn't show up in a demo. Satellite business plans meter priority data and bill the overage per gigabyte, and the fixed wireless you'd run alongside it is sized on throughput. Either way the uplink is a line item that grows with how much traffic you put over it — and a cloud-only system puts everything over it.
On a cloud-only till, every screen tap is a round trip: opening a category, looking up a guest, pricing a ticket, printing a receipt. Multiply that by every register, every scanner and every time clock, across a full Saturday. That is what you are metering.
Reads never leave the building
The gateway holds your catalogue, tickets, customers and staff locally and answers every terminal over your own network. Browsing a menu, looking up a pass or ringing a sale costs you nothing in uplink data.
Only changes cross the link
The gateway hydrates once, then exchanges deltas — what actually changed, in both directions. The uplink carries a sync stream, not a live feed of everyone using the system.
Software updates download once
A register update is pulled by the gateway a single time and served to every register over the LAN. Twelve registers is one download, not twelve — the difference an update-day makes to a metered plan is not subtle.
Size the link for sync, not for peak
Because an outage isn't an outage for operations, the uplink doesn't have to be sized and priced for your worst-case simultaneous load. It has to be good enough to catch up.
The same property makes a cheap second link genuinely useful. A modest fixed-wireless backup that couldn't carry a cloud-only resort at full tilt is more than enough to keep a sync queue moving — so redundancy stops being a luxury purchase.
The edge gateway is built to stay up too
Active/passive high availability
Larger properties can run a second gateway that takes over automatically if the primary fails, replicating state between them so nothing is lost in the handoff.
Card data never touches the edge
Payment processing is scoped so the on-site hardware never handles raw card data — offline-first doesn't mean loosely secured.
We'll pull the cable in front of you.
It's the part nobody believes until they watch a sale complete, a receipt print and a lift ticket come out with the uplink unplugged.