Blue Mountains · from our Penrith base
A Saturday lunch rush and an EFTPOS terminal that drops mid-service - up here that is not a support ticket, it is the day's takings. We look after venues and small businesses across the mountains from Penrith, at the bottom of the hill, and we have built the way we work around what is different up here: the lines, the buildings, and the weekends.
The operating reality
The Mountains are a long, thin strip of towns along one highway - Glenbrook, Blaxland, Springwood, Lawson, Wentworth Falls, Leura, Katoomba, Blackheath, Mount Victoria. From Sydney, one dead switch in Katoomba costs a technician half a day, so city providers lean on remote support long past the point where someone should have driven up. We are in Penrith, at the bottom of the hill. The lower mountains are a few minutes up the road and the whole strip is a normal service run, which is why on-site up here is our default, not our escalation.
The economics of an outage are different too. Mountains hospitality earns its week between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, and its year across school holidays and long weekends. When payments stop during Saturday lunch, that revenue is not delayed - it walks out the door and does not come back on Monday. So everything we build up here is sized for the worst hour of the busiest day, because that is the only hour that matters.
Large parts of the Mountains never got fibre. One street is FTTN at a workable speed, the next is a long copper run that crawls, and some addresses do better on fixed wireless than either. We qualify the actual technology and copper distance at your address before recommending anything - and where the line cannot be trusted, we put 4G/5G failover on the Telstra wholesale network behind the payments.
Sandstone, double brick, verandah infills and split levels make a 1920s guesthouse a hostile radio environment. The one-router setup that covers a modern office dies two rooms in. Old buildings need more, smaller access points, cabled back properly - and where heritage fabric rules out a cable path, a ceiling route, a different riser or a point-to-point wireless hop usually gets there.
Storms drop trees across lines up here, and bushfire season adds planned cuts on top. Losing power means losing the till, the cameras and the phones in the same moment. We put UPS units under the network core and the POS so short outages pass unnoticed.
Trade up here moves with the calendar: long weekends, school holidays, the autumn leaves, Yulefest in July, and snow days that fill the upper mountains with day-trippers by lunch. A network that idles on a wet Wednesday has to carry a full house on Saturday - plus every guest phone that arrives with it. We size for the peak, because the peak is where the money is.
Hospitality up the mountains
Glue IT manages the day-to-day technology for working venues across the Mountains and Western Sydney - restaurants, cafes, pubs, hotels and accommodation. Not install-and-disappear work: the standing kind, where we know the building, the till layout and what a long weekend does to the network.
Guest Wi-Fi is the quiet killer. On a busy Saturday the guest network carries many times the traffic of the staff side, and on an unsegmented network that load lands in the same lane as the EFTPOS - terminals slow, transactions time out, and the queue at the till grows while the connection still looks up. We build guest, staff and payments as separate networks on the same hardware, then size the internet plan for the long weekend rather than the Tuesday.
At the counter we work alongside the POS platforms venues really run - Bepoz, H&L, SwiftPOS, Lightspeed and Square - and we pick up the phone when the POS vendor and the internet provider start blaming each other. Around it: 4G/5G failover on the Telstra wholesale network so a dropped line does not stop payments, CCTV across all major brands under our NSW Master Security Licence (No. 000210516), and access control on Inner Range Integriti and Bosch Solution 6000 - including tying legacy systems from previous installers into the new one. The full venue stack - gaming-room networks, phones, the back office - lives on our pubs and clubs page.
A few of the venues and businesses whose technology we keep running.
Penrith
Katoomba
Katoomba
Wentworth Falls
The same crew looks after offices, clinics, shops and trades the length of the highway, and down the hill as well. Managed IT runs at $89 per user per month; project work is quoted per job. The building blocks are below.
Managed IT and one-off fixes for mountains offices and clinics.
Learn moreNew connections and provider switches - fixed-line where it reaches, fixed wireless where fibre is patchy.
Learn moreHosted phones on the Access4 / Broadsoft network and business mobile on the Telstra network.
Learn moreSLA-backed NBN, fixed wireless, Ethernet and fibre for sites that can't drop out.
Learn moreLaptops, desktops and Macs fixed by local techs - drop-off or on-site.
Learn moreRouters, UPS, handsets and business kit supplied and installed by the same team.
Learn moreGetting connected up here
Much of the mountains cannot get fixed-line fibre, and what an address can get changes street to street. We check the technology and the copper distance first, then match the site to a connection that will actually work.
Business-grade plans from $68/mo (25/5) up to gigabit 1000/400 at $320/mo, configured on site.
Basic 50/20 at $73/mo, Large 100/40 at $99/mo - a proper business connection, no fibre rollout to wait on.
SLA-backed symmetric links and fibre to the premises, cabled and certified by our own licensed techs.
See the full NBN & internet plans or tell us your address and we'll confirm it. Cabling is run and certified by owner Graham Hand, who wrote the McGraw-Hill textbook on telecommunications cabling and teaches the trade at TAFE NSW. Speeds are typical and not guaranteed.
Ten minutes or an hour up the hill, the same crew turns up. Find your town below.
Town-centre offices and tourism operators - VoIP, NBN and Wi-Fi.
IT support in KatoombaLower-mountains professional services and clinics - managed IT and cabling.
IT support in SpringwoodRetail strips and home offices - NBN setup, networking and support.
IT support in BlaxlandBoutique retail and hospitality - phones, EFTPOS and in-store Wi-Fi.
First stop up the highway - quick on-site installs and NBN.
Small business - fixed wireless where fixed-line fibre is patchy.
Mid-mountains homes and sole traders - internet and computer repair.
Family businesses and home offices - router setup and cabling.
Village-centre trades - business phones, mobile plans and NBN.
Home offices and micro-businesses - on-site help, no interstate call centre.
Town not listed? We still cover it - call 1300 458 348.
Usually not. The fix depends on what your address can physically get - FTTN performance hangs on copper distance, and some streets do better on fixed wireless than on the fixed line. We check the real options at your address and quote what will actually work - fixed line, fixed wireless or Ethernet - with 4G/5G failover behind it where the site cannot afford a dropout.
Yes - that is what the 4G/5G failover on the Telstra wholesale network is for. The router shifts traffic to mobile when the fixed line fails and shifts back when it recovers, so terminals keep transacting through the outage. We size it for payments first, so the things that earn money get the bandwidth.
Yes, with planning. We map cable paths around protected fabric - ceiling routes, existing risers, surface runs where they are permitted - and use point-to-point wireless where drilling is not an option. Coverage in stone buildings comes from more, smaller access points placed for the walls you actually have, not for the heat map of an empty modern office.
We come up. Penrith sits at the bottom of the hill, the whole strip is a normal run for us, and venue work in particular is hands-on work. Remote management covers the day-to-day in between - but when hardware needs hands, someone drives up.
One local team for the lot
Glue IT is a telco as well as your IT team. Business internet in the Blue Mountains and our nbn plans on the same bill, from the same people who answer the phone. Plans start at $68/mo with no lock-in.
The first visit is free: we walk the venue or the office, map what you run and what it depends on, and tell you where the next bad Saturday is hiding. No obligation - at worst you learn where the weak points are.