The repeater suggestion is exactly what I did at university. There was a network I could _just_ pick up most of the time on my laptop that I wanted to use (run

The repeater suggestion is exactly what I did at university. There was a network I could _just_ pick up most of the time on my laptop that I wanted to use (run by the central university rather than my college so it had fewer usage limits). Putting a DD-WRT router by my window which connected to it as a client, then shared the connection over Ethernet, got me a rock solid connection. It also lets you put your devices on their own subnet/NAT, which is nice from a security perspective (I've do this at home quite a lot - re-purposed router connects the main network on 2.4GHz and treats it as a WAN, then provides its own connections on 5GHz).