Can some MBA explain this to me?

[silvarios]

As a MacBook Air, I would be happy to explain…tethering fees only "made sense" when the data was "unlimited". Companies knew how much data you could reasonably use on a phone, even a smartphone, was much less than a normal computer or streaming video device (since most phones don't actually support HD resolutions, the video streams are lower bandwidth).

I used T-Mobile mobile data (T1 connected WPA2 Enterprise hotspots supplementing the EDGE data speeds) as my primary ISP a few years ago. With tethering, it was not unheard of to hit at least 2GB/month -- on EDGE!!!

Again, I sort of, kind of, almost understood why carriers wanted to start imposing a data tethering fee when there was no official data cap. Now with the data buckets officially capped, I don't understand the data tethering fee at all. 2GB is 2GB, doesn't matter how you connect. I think the bet being made is that many users actually use much less than their given data tier when used solely on the phone. Fear of insane overages on the soft cap another good reason to use less data; I'd prefer either a hard cap with an option to buy more data or a soft cap with throttling.

Oligarchies without reasonable competition plus powerful lobbying groups can do wonders for shoring up the bottom line.