Yeah, I use a mobile broadband provider for my home internet connection (albeit through a 5g router rather than tethering - but that shouldn't make a difference).

Normal web browsing etc is more or less indistinguishable from fibre or cable. Streaming - including high participant count Zoom meetings for work, as well as 4k Netflix etc - works perfectly well too.

But bittorrent? Nah. The sheer number of connections quickly overload the link, the speed drops to a max of only 1 or 2 Mbps, and it kills off anything else I'm trying to do at the same time.

Pushing / pulling containers has a similar issue - I have to set image_parallel_copies = 3 in /etc/containers/containers.conf as the default of 6 can cause problems, especially if two or containers are being pulled at the same time. I reckon that the comfortable limit for the number of parallel connections on 5g is probably somewhere around 10.

Plus, y'know, range requests have been supported since HTTP/1.1 way back in the mid 90s, so resuming downloads should work just fine with the likes of wget or any normal web browser.

Saying that, the author also mentions that he was WiFi - so why doesn't he just use that rather than tethering? Doesn't matter if it's slow, he could always do something else on the tethered connection while he waits...

I think the specific feature he alludes to missing is resumable downloads.

Both HTTP and even ancient protocols like FTP support that. So it must be something else.

Or a brainfart.