City provides free wireless internet, can't access it

[wwfmike]

Our City drapes a free wireless internet over our downtown area and I can access it fine from our sidewalk, but not more then a few feet inside our business. What can I do to reach the signal? Is there a device that I can put in our window to grab the signal and then my laptop can grab it from that?

[pyther]

You could get a router or a wireless router that supports an external antenna, mount the antenna outside, and then plug the laptop into the router using an ethernet port.

This would probably involve using patched firmware such as dd-wrt, openwrt, or tomato. You would need to essentially make the router act as a bridge, where it would connect to the wireless, and pass it through the Ethernet ports.