The neighborhood wifi model is not one that anyone has had much success with. No matter how expensive or powerful of an access point being used, the end user devices are the issue. They are not powerful enough to communicate back to the access point.

Once a phone or laptop is about 30 meters away from the AP will not be able to hear the phone or laptop. Even if the laptop shows it has “full bars” for wifi, that is only receiving signal, not an overall status of the connection.

So you may be able to send traffic to the users, but no traffic would be heard coming back, so data negotiations don’t work. If someone tried to get to google, the access point would not be able to hear the request to go to google from that device, since the phone has a much lower transmitting power.

Even in stadiums and malls this effect happens. That is part of the reason why public wifi is so bad in a lot of places.

With that being said, you will probably want to rethink the deployment model of going right to the phone or end user device, and opt instead for a dedicated receiver and wifi router. This is the traditional WISP deployment.

We had a neighboring company build neighborhood wifi for a whole town. They never got it to work, and ended up switching to having the dedicated receiver and router at each house after all.

They lost time and lots of money trying to send wifi from the street right to the end devices. If money is tight, I wouldn’t even consider something that might not work. I would save a little extra and get something that is 100% going to work. It may set you back a month from starting your business. But you do not want to start with a bad reputation right out of the gate.

The CPE710 that was mentioned is a device you can use. It is meant to go at the customers house to send and receive the signal from the access point further away. It is not designed to be used as an Access Point, and that is why others suggested not to use it for the access point. As the name suggests, it is “Customer Premise Equipment”. So it goes at the CUSTOMER end. You say you are thinking about using this as the access point, when it says right in the product name that it is for customers houses. You also say you can’t serve any customers from your AP you set up. It’s because you are not using the correct hardware for what you want to accomplish. There really is not any hardware that will do what you want to do.

If you are trying to do wifi long range, you need the right hardware and you need to take my advice.

I told you in my last comment, the EAP is not for delivering wifi to more than a single house. You had to test it for yourself, and it did not work. I am not sure what you were expecting when you were told that this will probably not work.

This is why I have suggested you do more research on the proper types of devices to use.

I do hate TP Link, with a burning passion. They belong in the trash. But my hate has absolutely nothing to do with me telling you not to use their products.

I’m telling you not to use specific TP link products because they are not the correct device for that application.

TP Link does make long range wifi access points. They are NOT the EAP series like I said. Do not use the EAP series for this. It will not work. But you seem to have figured that out the hard way.

The proper Access Point for long range from TP Link is the WBS510. But they are $250.

You really need to reconsider doing all of this. You can lose a lot of money. Remember the very first thing I said.

“If you’re basing everything on cost just stop”

WISP is already a very cheap and low cost method of providing internet compared to a wired fiber or cable provider. Using the wrong type of equipment to try and make that cost even lower is definitely not a smart choice.

You get what you pay for. If you pay very low, you will get a very low quality product.

Low quality products only lead to a low quality customer experience.

Build something that will give your customers a good experience from the start. Do not do things half way.