Access Point Suggestions for a big dorm network

Hi there,
I'm in charge of choosing Access Points which would be suitable for our dorm network with about 180 users.

  • The access points will be given to a subset of our dorm mates in exchange for a deposit about 40 €. So our price range for an access point is around that. Up to 60€ would also be fine for us, as well.
  • We are not allowed to attach APs on any floor walls. The dorm mates are supposed to take a normal (preconfigured) AP and place it somewhere as a "normal" home router.
  • PoE would be nice, but not necessary. We don't want any passive PoE.
  • Wifi 6 would be nice, but as shown in the ToH there are currently 6 devices supported which are all too expensive for us.
  • So, we stick to at least Wifi 5.

I took a look around the ToH and stumbled across TP-Link Archer C6 and C7. Are these suitable choices for my usecase or do you have any other suggestions?

Is MU-MIMO important for our usecase? Is MU-MIMO important enough to prefer the C6 instead of the C7?

I'm very looking forward to your input and would like to thank you in advance!

Cheers!
Lukas

whats the expected max speed, and where are you located, recommendations can vary based on product availability ....

We have 1 Gigabit-Ethernet in every room and are based in Germany.
Getting this speed by wifi, too, would be very nice, but not that important. I expect at least 100 MBit/s over 5 GHz.

do you have 1gbit each or you sharing 1gbit, and whats the uplink ?

We share in total 10 GBit/s up- and 10 GBit/s downstream. But the Ethernet cables in the walls are only capable of 1 GBit/s. We have to swap them one day...

If your switch is PoE you could issue these with each AP, it will convert practically any desktop router to PoE avoiding the need to find an AC outlet in the room.

At that price point you're probably looking at MT7621 hardware. There are a few models with ax wifi (the well supported MT7915 chip) but MT7621 CPU which probably can't fully exploit ax speed potential.