I think the caution about France also applies to places where surveillance requirements are not mandated but allowing a criminal to access the Internet through an open WiFi access point is classified as aiding and abetting a crime.I don't know where you live but in France we have a strong regulation about offering public access to the internet. It means you have to use tools that comply to the law requirements in order to do not have problems.
Scratchy, Purr and Shy insist that for a church it's neither necessary to use enterprise-grade radius authentication nor set up a captive portal to verify identities before enabling network address translation. It's enough to change the password weekly like in a family run coffee shop and announce the password inside the building.
I would hesitate to take legal advice from three kittens, but don't have any further insight myself. Presumably, you've already considered legal and liability implications and whether churches have additional constraints compared to coffee shops.
Back on topic. Since the WiFi protocol requires maintaining state for each active connection I agree this is more likely the limit you are seeing. On the other hand, if the difficulty is really just the available IP numbers, then a larger subnet likeAnd it's very likely that those who cannot connect have issues with Wifi rather than DHCP (unless you have pro acces points designed for hundreds of simultaneous connections)
192.168.xxx.xxx
should solve the problem without anything more.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Sat Jan 03, 2026 4:11 pm