Help with a portable WLAN for 30-60 clients (90% smartphone) all within line of sight.

Hi, I am looking for some help with the following scenario, I’m hoping that what to me is a giant brain melting new world, is of second nature to you profis! If this is too much to ask here then a pointer of where I might look for a someone to professionally consult would also be appreciated. We are located in Germany.

Scenario:

We send trainers to schools which often have a “lackluster” internet connection, and no LTE / 4g to speak of. We would like to offer a local portable WLAN which the students connect to, and view a locally hosted website served from my laptop.

I have tried a proof of concept with the network card in my laptop, and it works for serving local content. But after a significant amount of googling I am convinced we would need a decent AP, and possibly a router to handle DHCP on which I could install the fakeinternet package. Alternatively I could use the laptop for the DHCP and DNS but I am not that skilled up in networking so if there was the option to buy a router to take that off my plate I would probably take it.

Clients:

30 - 60 clients, all mobile or tablet, maybe one or two laptops sprinkled around.

Traffic shapes:

A website with minimal images / big files but lots of small requests getting pinged around to keep clients synchronised, a bit like a chatroom.

Downloading / Streaming a 16 - 20 mb video (it will be compressed with ffmpeg, so HD is not a requirement). Ideally they would stream it, but it is also possible to have them land on a page, then pre-load the video over a 10 min introduction period.

From what I have been reading 3mb/s per client would be more than enough as we can reduce the video file size to be quite small.

Physical scenario:

Room size is equivalent to classroom, or maybe the size of two connected classrooms. I.e small lecture hall.

We would always have line of sight, and can potentially attach the AP to something like a microphone stand.

Power would ideally come from a power socket.

Budget limitations:

I think the MR55 or most of the meraki range is out of our budget.

Questions:

I have tried googling things like "single classroom AP", "portable WLAN", "High Density portable classroom WLAN", and "cafe WLAN setup". But I can’t find anything that fits this specific scenario (lots of outdoor, or larger campus kind of articles come up), if there is a specific term that I am missing then please just let me know so I can continue researching on my own.

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1. Would something like a single UniFi AC Pro AP work? Or is the environment dense enough that a high density model like the UAP‑AC‑HD would make more sense.
2. If I wanted to power the access point via a power socket, and it doesn’t come with an adapter do I have to buy a POE injector?
3. Is there a router that would meet the above requirements?
4. If we were to expand to more clients could I theoretically just add more Access Points to the setup, and the bottleneck would probably become the laptop’s specs? Or would I need another piece of kit to manage the APs?
5. Would there be some kind of jam up when the clients all connect and try to download / pre-load the video? I.e. If there is a bowl full of punch and each person has a straw and they all try to drink one portion of punch at the same time. a) their heads would get in the way of each other, and it would be chaos. b) they would take turns. c) the head size is not relevant, the straw size would just decrease with each additional punch drinker. and it would take the people longer to drink their portion. d) some other scenario.

Thank you for your time!