What are the disadvantages of sharing Internet connection?

The Hidden Costs of Shared Internet Connections

Sharing your internet connection, whether through tethering or other methods, often comes with unforeseen consequences. While seemingly convenient, the disadvantages can significantly impact your online experience and potentially disrupt your workflow. One key drawback is the substantial reduction in internet speed.

Tethering, a popular method for connecting multiple devices to a single internet source, is a notorious speed killer. The act of sharing your data stream to multiple devices creates a bottleneck, severely diminishing the available bandwidth for each user. This leads to noticeably slower browsing, buffering issues during video streaming, and delays in downloading files. Critically, the performance degradation is not uniform across tethering methods. Bluetooth tethering, in particular, exhibits significantly poorer performance than other options, often resulting in a nearly unusable experience.

Even high-speed internet connections are vulnerable to these performance issues when shared. A connection that might typically be lightning-fast can degrade into a frustrating crawl when subjected to the strain of multiple users. This severely limits the practicality of tethering as a viable solution for maintaining high performance across multiple devices, especially when working or engaging in activities requiring a rapid internet connection. The reduced speed isn’t just an inconvenience; it can hamper productivity, create frustration, and ultimately lead to a diminished overall user experience.