Any way to set a metered connection by time of day?

Question

Any way to set a metered connection by time of day?

GraniteStateColin 156

Starlink is the only decent Internet connection available in rural areas like ours. They are now implementing a monthly data cap for all data transferred between 7am and 11pm local time. Is there any way to have Windows treat Internet access (but not LAN access) as metered during those hours, and then open up to non-metered for the rest of the time (11pm to 7am)? This is for both Windows 10 and 11 systems.

If not, what are recommended work-arounds that come as close to that as possible?

We need to get our data usage down to avoid the throttling during business hours that will occur otherwise.

Dillon Silzer 57,831 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2022-11-06T04:29:10.633+00:00

I do not believe there is a Windows 10 out-of-box solution for exactly what you are looking for. Is this for one home/location or would this be required across an entire area? I would try doing this at the network level instead of the device level.
GraniteStateColin 156 Reputation points

2022-11-06T04:41:00.837+00:00

It's a small location with a little over a half dozen Windows computers. Windows has all the right features built-in with its Metered Network support -- only downloading certain classes of information, like updates, when NOT on a metered network. Therefore, if we could just set it to metered during the hours when our ISP treats it as metered, that would be ideal.

At the network level... not sure what we'd set. We don't want to make it impossible to, say, force an upgrade during business hours, we just don't want Windows to initiate it and start pulling down GB of data during those metered periods. That's exactly what the metered network feature is intended to do.

This is fairly common with limited capacity networks -- metered during the day, but not at night. I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't support this as a core function of the metered network setting.

Or maybe you meant we should change something in the router to indicate to Windows during the day that it is a metered network? If so, that's fine too, but how? How does Windows decide if a network is metered or not?

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Dillon Silzer 57,831 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2022-11-06T04:29:10.633+00:00

I do not believe there is a Windows 10 out-of-box solution for exactly what you are looking for. Is this for one home/location or would this be required across an entire area? I would try doing this at the network level instead of the device level.
GraniteStateColin 156 Reputation points

2022-11-06T04:41:00.837+00:00

It's a small location with a little over a half dozen Windows computers. Windows has all the right features built-in with its Metered Network support -- only downloading certain classes of information, like updates, when NOT on a metered network. Therefore, if we could just set it to metered during the hours when our ISP treats it as metered, that would be ideal.

At the network level... not sure what we'd set. We don't want to make it impossible to, say, force an upgrade during business hours, we just don't want Windows to initiate it and start pulling down GB of data during those metered periods. That's exactly what the metered network feature is intended to do.

This is fairly common with limited capacity networks -- metered during the day, but not at night. I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't support this as a core function of the metered network setting.

Or maybe you meant we should change something in the router to indicate to Windows during the day that it is a metered network? If so, that's fine too, but how? How does Windows decide if a network is metered or not?

Answer 1

Roy Bakker 301

@GraniteStateColin

Hi,

You could write a powershell script to set the connection from metered to not metred and vise versa.
Schedule the scripts at the desired time.

I found an example of the script:
https://4sysops.com/archives/set-windows-10-ethernet-connection-to-metered-with-powershell/

Hope this helps

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Any way to set a metered connection by time of day?

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