In a way, the Althea wireless network already does this, but it looks like a more conventional wireless ISP in some ways. If you have upstream connectivity that you provide to a downstream customer, you earn a cut. If you have access to a mountaintop or something and run a repeater that suddenly brings a lot of nodes better connectivity, you earn a cut.
Personally, I've always been surprised that traditional cellular networks didn't try to incentivize femtocell placement by awarding compensatory minutes or megs or something, to the operator of the serving femtocell. Imagine someone with an apartment over the old bakery downtown where the historical district has made it difficult to place normal towers, so they get a femtocell for their own usage. But if it carries other customers' traffic, they'd get kickbacks and incentive to place it near the window where it has the best view of the shopping area below. Suddenly they're working on RF optimization without even knowing it.
In both cases, you have an existing payment expectation that you're just piggybacking on. People already pay their ISP for connectivity, so they expect to pay Althea, and the distribution of money after that is a detail. People already pay their cellco for service, and if some of that kicks back to other customers, that's a detail.
I think your idea has legs, if you can solve the onboarding and payment expectation. There's also a critical-mass problem that Apple solved with Find My by just force-installing it on every device without consent, and you can't do that. So people will only run your software if they:
A) know about it
B) are in a place with poor enough connectivity that it's needed
C) are in a place with enough user density that it's worthwhile
D) perceive that it doesn't unduly kill their battery while in a place that also might not have a lot of opportunities to charge
That's a mighty tricky combination, especially the overlap between B and C. The only setting I can imagine is Burning Man. But micropayments directly conflict with the gifting and decommodification principles.