When the lights go out, hospitality keeps trading. This paper documents the cellular-first network design Dines runs at peak — and the trade-offs that come with it.
01 — Why cellular winsThe case for treating Wi-Fi as a fallback.
Most POS deployments treat cellular as a backup. We invert that — every iPad keeps an active eSIM that is monitored, scored, and selected at the start of every transaction.
02 — TopologyWhat lives where, and why.
Card readers pair to the iPad over BLE. The iPad routes the transaction to whichever uplink scored highest in the last 60 seconds. Settlement is queued client-side and reconciled against a central ledger every 30 seconds.
- Hot-swappable eSIMs across three carriers.
- Per-transaction route selection, scored every 60 seconds.
- Server-confirmed settlement every 30 seconds, fully idempotent.
RP
Rohan PatelPrincipal Engineer, Dines
Rohan owns the offline-first transaction stack at Dines.