How to increase the amount of time the wifi waits before timing out a connection? I'm currently traveling abroad.  Sometimes when connecting to a very old or a heavily used router, the connection will timeout after 2-3 seconds.  I think some of these routers just need more time to respond to my connection request, I would like to increase the wait time to 10-12 seconds before the wifi times out the connection.

Such things do not appear to be configurable through the networking GUI.  I'm quite handy with the terminal but not familiar enough with networking to know where to look.
I doubt there's anything you can do short of jailbreaking and re-flashing the code that drives the wireless chipset.

The things you can control are getting closer to the transmitter, potentiallly moving objects that could attenuate or reflect Wi-Fi signals or set up a repeater to sit within range of both the base station and the location where you wish to have network coverage.