I am volunteering to build a few mobile gaming stations for the Mott Children and Women's Hospital, well, more for the Children's part, with Xbox 360 consoles. I am facing a dilemma of connecting the Xboxes to the network, preferably wirelessly. I've got a Microsoft USB 802.11g wireless adapter. The problems are on the network side.
At the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS), which the Mott hospital is part of, wireless networks are based on Cisco's Unified Wireless Network architecture. A segregated wireless LAN named guest is provided for patients and their families visiting the hospital, which so far has worked nicely for everyone.
Now, the problem. The guest WLAN requires authentication. The process is not complicated: You find the guest WLAN, connect to it, open a browser, enter your last name and a valid email address. That's it! Of course, in the unbounded wisdom of Microsoft product designers, they removed the browser from the game console, which means a user is able to connect to the guest wireless LAN, but has no way to go through that simple authentication process.
I have tried the MCEBrowser. The problem with that is that it requires Microsoft Windows Media Center to run, which is fine for home users but not in a hospital environment, not to mention the great pain that Windows Media Center is by itself.
One suggestion given to me is to use a Cisco wireless workgroup bridge to connect the Xbox 360, which is quite interesting and I will try that soon. However, I am not clear how that works around the authentication issue, yet.
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