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Hi guys,
I live right next door to a hotel that has free wifi, I often go into there for lunch during the day and drinks at the bar some evenings. When I'm in there I usually connect to the open wifi network on my phone and browse the web. The network shows up as unsecured and the manager there told me it is free for anyone to use. Now as I said, I live right next door to this hotel, I've found out that I can get a decent signal from corner of a room in my house. Problem is that room is a small crapped utility room, I squash myself in there to check mail and do some light browsing. My question is if I wanted to somehow route this open wifi signal to other rooms in my house wirelessly, how would I go about this? If anyone has any ideas any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Try getting a Ruckus Metroflex or some sort of other CPE that boosts the signal.

The Ruckus gives you a good 200 mW or so (if I remember right), which I'm guessing is enough to let you roam through the rest of your house and get on that SSID.

Hi James,

The ethics of Wi-Fi piggybacking is a pretty hotly debated topic and I would caution extending your neighbor's Wi-Fi into your house for two reasons. First, your neighbor pays for this access as a service to guests, which makes your use just fine while you're sipping cocktails as a guest at the bar. On the other hand, if you have gotten permission to use it at home, then all bets are off. Second, open Wi-Fi networks, as I'm sure you know, offer no security. A better alternative to borrowing open Wi-Fi is to pay for cheap monthly access yourself and secure it with WPA2-Personal.

No less, I'm no Wi-Fi police, and like I said, this topic is hotly debated. If you have gotten permission for use at home, one way to extend the range is to use a repeater. The quality of a "repeated" signal depends on the quality of the originating signal that you can pick up from the corner of your house, but I suspect you could provide sufficient coverage for web browsing throughout your house.

Jim Geier wrote a tutorial on repeaters, which is available here:

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1571601

Hope this helps.

Regarding Marcus' two points, (1) ethics, and (2) security.

(1) YMMV on the ethics, depending on the situation.

(2) Even if they're not secure, you can make your traffic secure by tunneling all your traffic. This can be done by, say, ssh'ing to a host and then proxying all your traffic (e.g. http) through it or you might simply get a tunneling service (e.g. PPTP). Either way, people who are on the same network will not be able to inspect the contents of your traffic.

Thanks for your elaboration, Rog. I made a few assumptions about the audience regarding WLAN security. For a new member of the forum (jamesjoyce) who intends to borrow open Wi-Fi, I assumed that proxying traffic or using a tunneling service was not likely in James's purview. In reality, a hotel full of unsuspecting unprotected users will probably shield James from potential attackers, but it remains that a lack of security can cause problems.

YMMV is a new one to me. :)

I had to look that up about 6 months ago.

Your Mileage May Vary.

GT