Except you didn't? You paid for all-you-can-eat-on-a-phone, and 5 GB extra. So it's a dormitory with unlimited dining hall, but you can only take one plate a week outside of the dining hall.

For the provider, the point of this design is that there's only a certain amount that people are willing to download on a phone or eat in a dining hall. For the consumer, they don't have to count their data or their servings as long as they follow a simple rule - they get predictable billing.

> So it's a dormitory with unlimited dining hall, but you can only take one plate a week outside of the dining hall.

You see how that's bad, right?

My phone service, a utility, should not be micromanaging me.

They aren’t, they manage their spectrum you are agreeing to use.

They should not even know when I'm tethering.

That's one point of view, but you just banned unlimited-on-your-phone plans that a lot of people presumably enjoyed. If they change them to simple unlimited plans, you'll be popular. If they only offer limited plans now, you'll be unpopular.

They would never get rid of unlimited. It's marketing gold.

No one banned unlimited, you suggested.

We have a number of mobile services in the UK who explicitly offer routers with WiFi slots for replacing your home broadband with unlimited SIMs. I have used them in the past to replace the wired internet when there has been line maintenance that took out the broadband for a couple of days.

4G alone can get you a nice stable 100Mb/s.

You seem to be defending a shitty deal that happening in North America, without any clear reason.