GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 761825
NetworkManager needs a tag for network charged for flow accounting
Last modified: 2016-02-10 15:45:30 UTC
I have taken my laptop to an area where Wifi network is not available, so I enabled my mobile phone's Wifi tethering. However, PackageKit downloaded my system update (315MB as apt told me) in the background. (I only used 75MB :-( ) My data network have 1GB per month, and cost 315MB in an afternoon is unacceptable. So I think there should be a tag for flow-charged networks. If a network is tagged as flow-charged, maybe some large background downloads should be disabled. (For this, we can refer to Android, which have APIs for applications to check whether a WiFi network is flow-charged, and change the behavior of the application) It's a feature about money, so I think it critical.
Now NM provides for every interface a 'metered' flag which can be used by other applications to detect when the traffic is subject to costs or limitations of some kinds. It is possible to specify whether a device is metered in the connection profile, or let NM decide the value based on some heuristics (for example the type of connection or DHCP options sent by servers). It is up to applications to use this information and limit / forbid traffic on metered interfaces. This feature is available in NM 1.2 and was also backported to 1.0.6. See bug 741725 for more information. Closing this, please reopen if needed. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 741725 ***