We have 4 windows 10 machines here and a metered satellite internet connection for internet service. Didn't really think about it much until they pushed an update to all 4 machines the week after our monthly meter tripped on our service.
Next thing I knew I was on throttled internet for 3 weeks. Setting all the machines so that they don't update turned out to not be too hard, but was FAR harder than it needed to be. I'll decide when my equipment updates.
I did set everything to metered. That's how I finally stopped the updates. My point though was that MS doesn't consider very many non-mainstream cases.
One study says nearly 7% of all internet users in the US use a satellite connection. These are slow, and almost always metered. That is a lot of people getting surprise hammering of their connection.
While I’m not familiar with the equivalent features in Windows I believe MacOS can do this, you can have one machine share the updates to the others on your network. The feature is now even in the non-server version of the OS too.
You can cache iOS device updates with this mechanism as well. I’ve never bothered as I’m fortunate not to worry about metered bandwidth, but it seems like a nice feature if it works as advertised.
So, at best, that would have cut his data usage to 25%. I don't see how you assume this would've solved the issue when we're taking about such a massive update of an OS.
Did you mark the connection as metered in windows? Seems to be the only reliable way to prevent it from downloading updates automatically, if they "fixed" that, they have really lost their minds.
Next thing I knew I was on throttled internet for 3 weeks. Setting all the machines so that they don't update turned out to not be too hard, but was FAR harder than it needed to be. I'll decide when my equipment updates.