I'm Army Reserve and we frequently have this problem in field exercises. Fire up some Win10 laptops on our very limited Verizon MiFi access point, they promptly download gig's of updates without consent and immediately push the bandwidth past the limit and the AP gets throttled to oblivion.

Yeah yeah you can turn of Windows updates or whatever, but you shouldn't have to do that just to force Microsoft to respect your wishes to update when you want to. And no, I'm not talking about some stupid restricted 8-hour window with no other option outside completely shutting down the service. TBH I'm still surprised they haven't tried to block users from doing that too at this point.

Windows 10 has the option of specifying that a specific network is a metered connection. It won't update the OS when connected to those networks. Found this out the hard way after getting a big bill while traveling and tethering to my phone's 4G connection.

Good idea thanks. We'll check it out. But of course again, that's not something the user should have to do (and not something we want to have to do on every single system that connects). Wifi != "unlimited bandwidth."

I could have sworn that with Anniversary and later this is no longer the case, as people used that on their home network to get Windows to shut up.

> I once had to turn off updates on all laptops in my workplace so we could use the internet.

In such a situation you can dramatically reduce the bandwidth required by setting up an update server. There's no need for every laptop to download the same patch from the internet, download the patch once and everyone gets it.

(I appreciate that doesn't help the situation where you don't have enough data for one machine)

You should have a look at traffic shaping and different networking queues. Fq_codel is great, but even SFQ works better than nothing. No need to turn off updates.