[judge2020]

There is a limited amount of throughput a tower can handle, both on its backhaul and antennas. Depending on what you're doing over that tethered connection, you might be using up 2x-10x the throughput they provisioned for "you"; if enough people tether at once during rush hour, there's going to be a significant drop in speeds for both you and people just trying to use their phones normally.

This is why that, when phones tether, those tethered packets are routed separately so that the cell carrier can throttle them when needed to maintal quality of service for everyone else.

By tethering/tunneling through your normal connection, they can't do this, and if this became an epidemic they would either need to do thorough DPI and heuristics to detect and block the tethering/ban the user, or over-provision their towers to handle the varied traffic volumes of both regular cell phone activity and people watching 4k Netflix on their TV through their phone.

[deniska]

Fine.

launches bittorrent client on the phone

[netr0ute]

This is technically true, but the issue is that it essentially keeps us form progressing technologically. Therefore, it's fine to ignore their rules.

[judge2020]

In general a few dozen or even thousand techies on HN doing this across the US isn't going to change anything, but it's obvious that we'd eventually have a huge problem if everyone moving into a new apartment or house decided to forego wired internet and instead stream exclusively over a hidden tether to their phone. This is why, when actual fully-supported home internet over 5g is available in an area[0,1], availability tends to be limited and people still sometimes get deprioritized.

0: https://www.t-mobile.com/home-internet

1: https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/

[morsch]

Somehow other countries make it work.