One of our neighbors who lived a couple of kms from us had a point-to-point Motorola antenna connecting with the closest village. We considered doing that but there was a mountain between us and the village which complicated things. Also connectivity in the area was so bad the only ISP available hadn't been signing new contracts for years. The region was difficult to access and wasn't particularly rich, it didn't make sense for ISPs to invest in upgrading 15 years old ADSL.
That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?
So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.
The huge antenna [1] was connected to an Alfa R36 hotspot which was fairly powerful. I guess that's why it worked.
[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML...
https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Directional-Parabolic-Connect...
I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore.
After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so.
If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!