In essence, this charges the device (which we’ll assume is your smartphone, but it could just as easily be a carrier-connected tablet) while you’re using it. When you connect via USB the device (we’ll call it a laptop, for the sake of simplicity) gets power via the USB cable. Tethering consumes energy by expending power through the antenna to communicate with the carrier. If the device you’re connecting is able to connect to your smartphone or tablet (whichever device has the data plan that you’re using to tether through), that’s probably the best option. That begs the question: which is best out of all the tethering methods? USB Cable
We also have numerous ways to connect our laptops to our phones - and we have many more devices than just laptops that need connecting. Today we have our choice of various high-speed technologies offered by any one of a handful of cellular carriers. Speeds weren’t all that great, but being able to work from anywhere often trumped that. Here we had a little phone that we could connect to our laptop which would let us access the Internet or closed network (the office, university, etc.) without having to plug into a land-line to do so.
Tethering is one of those things that many of us got really excited about way back in the early days of cell phones.
