Australian ski village turns to wireless for logistics, operations, and, eventually, guest access: This is an excellent case study of how wireless allows a company to achieve a lot of related, but separately difficult goals with a single system that they don't pay recurring telco costs on and which is flexible for deployment and expansion.
The ski resort put in 2 Mbps link (the article doesn't explain why 11 Mbps wasn't an option) to connect various mountains and provide Internet access distributed across the system. They can remotely control snow making machines (hope your network is secure, folks), and will eventually be able to use wireless to authenticate tickets instead of requiring manual pass checkers.
(When I skied at Montana's Big Sky last year, there were no lines: partly because the big snow hadn't fallen yet by late January, partly because of the nature of the place, and partly because the turnstiles for access to the liftlines were self-serve, scanning one's pass.)