I was approached with this scenario by a co-worker.
Free outside wireless wifi in our town covering the downtown Plaza courtesy of the city to promote people coming downtown and living, shopping etc. He has an apartment on the Plaza. Older building with lath plaster and lots of steel, brick etc. It was a bank building now converted to apartments. Free wifi signal drops way down after it hits the building. Can still get it inside but is much weaker.
He has an Xbox 360 and he wants to see if he can use the free signal to stream his Netflix movies via the Xbox 360. Is there some way he can capture the high strength outside signal and route it inside to the xbox?
The xbox 360 has (I believe) a wired Ethernet port and he used it for netfilx when he was in a house wired directly to the cable router. Is there a way to do this or is this a boondoggle project?
The easiest might be to put the Xbox at a window. Otherwise, you’re looking at a fair bit of hardware in the form of an outdoor or window-mount antenna connected to a bridged wireless access point.
It may be possible via a repeater or wireless bridge, which usually is the same piece of equipment just operating in different modes. Basically they will need to set up the device where it has a clear signal, even attach a directional antenna if needed. And take it wirelessly or wired from there.
To expand on this, I’ve had good results using the TP Link TL-WR702N for this kind of thing. It has a number of operating modes, but one of them connects to an existing WiFi network (i.e. the free one), and provides a wired connection to a client device (i.e. the Xbox). The router would need to be able to “see” the WiFi network, so it might need to be on a windowsill or dangled out a window or something. The model I linked to is the one I have - there may be a newer equivalent by now. Mine only cost around £30 if memory serves, and has been a handy little problem solver.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the free WiFi may well be throttled to prevent people streaming video and hogging the bandwidth - and even if it isn’t, it might not be fast enough to make the enterprise worthwhile, especially at peak times when the network is in heavy use.
I did something similar using a wireless-ethernet bridge. Used Power over Ethernet (PoE) so power connection was not required at radio location, just a Cat 5/6 cable. The cisco bridges seemed to fail after a year or so of outdoor use…the location was sheltered from rain/snow, but still experienced temperature extremes.
If the signal is weak, a gain antenna might be helpful. There is one panel antenna called a “rootenna” that has a pocket (like a kangaROO) to mount the Ethernet bridge inside.
You can also throttle the bandwidth Netflix uses. It may be available in the settings on Xbox, I don’t know. But you can definitely do it on the website if you’re logged in. Here are the instructions.
I have my dad’s account throttled so he can watch stuff on his phone without burning through the data.
And, yeah, use a wireless bridge. If he already has one, pretty much any wireless router (including those you get for free from your ISP) can be turned into one.