What happens if the internet goes down?
Compartment control keeps working locally and reconciles when the connection returns. Monitoring flags the outage rather than waiting for a complaint.
The failure mode that matters is a resident standing in front of a locker that will not open. The design assumption is that connectivity will fail, because in buildings it does.
Local control
Compartment access is designed to keep functioning without a live connection, with the system reconciling transactions once connectivity returns. A brief network drop should be invisible to somebody collecting an item.
The outage is flagged, not discovered
Loss of connectivity is itself an alert. Nobody should learn about it from a resident, and the building should not learn about it from a resident either.
What to ask a provider
Specifically what still works offline and for how long. Whether payments queue or fail. What happens to a reservation made just before the drop. These answers vary between providers considerably, and the vague ones are vague for a reason.
Get this answered for your building
A proposal states which figures are contractual and which are estimates, in writing.