Right now there are about 6,000 people in San Francisco who use Open Garden — that’s less than 1 percent of the city’s population.

But there are a few other speed bumps. The software doesn’t run on IOS — Apple doesn’t let developers mess around with the iPhone’s networking stack — and it’s not clear if Apple will ever allow Open Garden to work on its devices. Shalunov thinks it will. “If we show them millions of happy Android users, we think that’s a good way to convince Apple,” he says.

Some carriers seem to like Open Garden — the European carrier Orange recently invited the company by to give a tech talk on its product — but others don’t. AT&T, for example, blocks it in its Google Play store.

Then there’s the big question: If you already have a great internet connection, why would you want to run Open Garden and help everyone else out? “Incentivizing users to share their limited resources — their battery life, their data usage is actually a critical problem in this space,” Devabhaktuni says.

But he and Benoliel both agree there are ways to do this. Open Garden could adopt a credit system: you share some of your internet access now in return for the right to borrow some later, when you’re traveling in a foreign country or you’re out of range of your carrier.

In the meantime, Benoliel thinks the software will take off at conferences, where you have a lot of people clamoring for the same network resources. Typically, tech conferences are a a black hole for many users, but Open Garden could help solve that. “The more people who are on the open garden network, the better connectivity you can achieve,” he says. “You can bundle the capacities of all the networks of everyone.”

That may sound like a utopian ideal, but Benoliel and Shalunov are used to that rap.

Back when he was at Internet2, Shalunov remembers a National Science Foundation director dropping by his office in Armonk, New York, one day and asking the technical people there what they saw as the next big thing on the internet. Shalunov said that one day everything will be a router. “He thought it was science fiction,” Shalunov says.