A company I used to work for specialized in exactly this case - high density WiFi. They have an 8 radio / 24 antenna AP: https://www.xirrus.com/product/xr-4000-

A company I used to work for specialized in exactly this case - high density WiFi. They have an 8 radio / 24 antenna AP: https://www.xirrus.com/product/xr-4000-series/ https://www.xirrus.com/product/xr-4000-series/ You can use 6 20 MHz channels in the 5GHz band and 1 or 2 channels in the 2.4 GHz band, on each of these multi-APs, and you can get much smaller "cell sizes" (low power signal, smaller signal area) than cellular providers. You can bump clients from busier channels on to less busy ones to force better balance. WiFi drivers for clients and APs are a big pile of bugs - the resilience (retries at lower rates, chip-timeout-resets, etc) covers a lot of them up. You can get more consistent throughput and latency by digging in and fixing these bugs (and working around bugs in most clients). Most good WiFi APs are debugged until they work pretty well for the "typical" home or office use-cases. But the Xirrus APs (and some competitors to some degree) are debugged for the "high density" use-case - multiple hundreds of users per multi-AP, and maybe 8 to 30 of these multi-APs in a large conference hall or stadium. You have to know what you're doing. It is expensive. Niantic has a hugely popular service. They're making money. But they never seem to know how to handle the massive scale that was predictable after the first month or so. They sold tickets, they knew how many were coming. There are people who know how to handle that. Niantic just didn't feel like doing the research to find out how or who to handle it. Their systems fall over again and again and again.