>It shouldn't be anything to do with the carrier. The carrier should be a pipe. Blame bandwidth delusions all around for that. Carriers price on the assumptio

>It shouldn't be anything to do with the carrier. The carrier should be a pipe. Blame bandwidth delusions all around for that. Carriers price on the assumption that while your caps are high, they really want your usage to be low. This is simply a response to customer delusions that the pipes are boundless and free (which is not true on landlines, and is enormously untrue in the wireless spectrum): See all of the salivation over the supposed unlimited plan Verizon might offer. So my cell plan gives me 5GB. In an average month I seldom use 500MB (I'm always around wifi it seems), and that's exactly within their expectations. If I start tethering my phone, however, my average is going to go way up. If carriers priced simply on throughput -- say $0.10 a MB or something -- they would be overjoyed to turn on and encourage all of the tethering you could ever want.