Is it possible that the number of people connected to my Wireless Access Point or wireless router is causing spotty connectivity? The bandwidth is unaffected but it seems that the more people we connect to the WAP the more is drops the connection. The connection drops for 5 - 15 mins at a time for everyone and then restores on its own.
This can happen for a few reasons and will depend on the specific hardware and firmware you're using. We've seen excessive interference on a channel from lots of clients and neighboring APs overwhelm the CPU on a Meraki MR12. All clients would experience a loss of connectivity until we rebooted the device. We switched to the more powerful, dual-band MR16 and the problems disappeared.
Lower end consumer hardware will generally come with less memory, slower CPUs and firmware that is less robust to high load conditions. Higher end enterprise hardware will generally perform much better under load and will be spec'd to handle a certain number of simultaneous clients.
Even with high end hardware, you will eventually run into a physical limitation of the available spectrum. Dual-band hardware operating in the less congested 5ghz bands can help here.