You can get a high gain WiFi antenna and an amplifier. A $100 amplifier + a $100 directional antenna should greatly increase your wireless range versus a stock WiFi solution. On the other hand WiFi is not a magic bullet, live WiFi sessions can be traced and the police have many times in the past traced people who tried to get all of their anonymity by using neighbors WiFi. It is definitely better imo to do this than to use your own internet, but especially if you don't move around much, the anonymity benefit of doing this is fairly minimal. For best results you would use new WiFi hotspot from new location every time you connect, people doing that by itself can manage to be untraceable indefinitely if they go about it right. So the answer to your question is yes you can use WiFi from significant distances away, but it partially depends on the strength of the WiFi access point you are using as well, however high end WiFi equipment is more sensitive to signals as well so it can pick up fainter signals from greater distance, and of course if you have an amplifier and a high end antenna you can send WiFi signals for many miles depending on environmental variables as well though (dozens or even hundreds of miles are possible with direct line of sight, add some trees in the way and the distance is much less though). I think it is reasonable to think that you can in practice increase your transmit distance by about five or six times a stock solution, and your receive sensitivity can be significantly increased as well.