I'm going to make some assumptions here, and some will likely disagree with some of my comments.
This sounds like what we have gone through. Wifi is not designed for video, recent updates have tried to fix this but it is still problematic. Then you throw in the unknown of people watching videos, and a couple hundred concurrent connections, during service with children playing gaming apps on their phones, wifi degrades fast and unpredictably. It does not matter what the ISP connection is when wifi breaks.
From what my church went through, and discussions I had with a number of professional networking folks, video over wifi is an art not a science. The is especially true in a church with a guest wifi network (Up to 200 people in a service for us, some with multiple devices) being shared with critical infrastructure. Maybe this does not apply to you, but hopefully others will find it useful.
This was the solution we implemented:
https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi- ... s/unifi-hdUbiquiti offers some other "thunderous" access points, but the radiation pattern of that one is ideal for worship center ceiling mount as its pattern is done. The other units have even patterns which includes up so as to service upper floors in a building, which is not what we were trying to do. We want all the energy down and a bit out to the sides. Ubiqiti gives full radiation pattern data.
Before the Mini Pro our goal was to be able to stream high quality internet content to up to 8 bible study classes while also providing members guest access for online bible services. The key here is the leaders have full access to the internet, all others are metered so they can't stream any videos (for example). In other words the leaders are at church to stream, nobody else is, everybody else has service to use online bible resources of their choosing and likely can check their emails accounts as well.
The unifi HD supports up to 4 separate networks with unique settings for each network. So I have a public guest network that supports (from memory) 1 mbs down and 256 mbs up per user, the public gets clamped down HARD to just use what they should be using in church. If they dont like it, then they can use their cell service. This may sound harsh but we need the network to do what it is there for and not beyond that. Then there is another network for the leaders which is unlimited access. This part of the building is about 100 feet in diameter with the worship center on the upper floor and classes in the lower floor. There is about 3.0 inches of particle board that make the floor of the worship center, the access point in on the ceiling here.
Thus far it has worked great. Everybody has the service they need. While hardwired is always preferred, sometimes we do need a device in a location where wifi is easiest and hardwire is just a tripping hazard. This access point does a great job of empowering us to get the rate we need for critical devices.
One other interesting note. Mac and PCs are very different in some interesting ways. Mac's always seem to have very good wifi support, PCs do not. Macs always have 2&5 ghz wifi, PCs do not. When I look at the specs for PCs/Laptops I often find their wifi card supports both, however further research discovers that many manufacturers do NOT include a 5ghz antenna in their design where Apple always does. 5 ghz support is a big deal and can make or break streaming. It was a bit shocking to find the games PCs make by listing cards with 2 and 5 ghz support but not stating there is no 5 ghz antenna ......
I have found the cheap Amazon 2/5 ghz usb dongles for $20 will fix the wifi issue of PC laptops. These dongles have large ugly antennas with good gain as well having 5ghz support.
So to review:
1) Hardwire if you can
2) Get a high end access point that gives you good control over network metering
- Clamp down HARD on guests to make sure Wifi does what you need
3) If you have to use wifi make sure you have dedicated data rate that guests can not use up on you
4) Use MACs if you can, if you have to use a PC verify it has 5ghz support, get a dongle if it does not
BTW I can access the Unifi HD from the other part of our building 150+ feet away. This thing works great. The guest network does have a password that gets changed periodically so the residential neighbors don't get a free ride. Yes, the HD also works will out into the parking lot and property boundary, some neighbors could easily access it. For reference, our ISP service is 150 down and 20 up. This week I will be bringing 2 more Mini Pros on line for 3 concurrent Live Streams on Sundays (English, Spanish and Signing), so we are about to test the 20 up rate.
I would NEVER try running the Mini Pro over WiFi in our church, but if you need to then hopefully the above will be useful to you. I have helped some other churchs and I have seen how unavoidable wifi can be, like having the modem in a different building and using wifi to span those buildings because running ethernet is too hard.
HTH!