1474275 - RCWN is enabled on metered Wifi connections

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4408bb821f5b only cares about the physical connection type, but at least on all supported Android versions and Windows 8+ (maybe other OSs as well) a Wifi connection can be designated as metered as well, in which case it might make sense to disable RCWN after all.

Comment 1

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

We don't currently appear to have any Gecko APIs to detect metered connections.

I found "some" info on the OS APIs we could use, but it's not clear easy it would be to use them in Gecko:
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/Network-Information-Sample-63aaa201/
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/ConnectivityManager.html#isActiveNetworkMetered()

Comment 2

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

And the corresponding issue with the official Network Information API specification seems to have stalled somewhat, too:
https://github.com/WICG/netinfo/issues/41

Comment 3

[Damian Yerrick]

Examples of metered Wi-Fi connections include a mobile hotspot device, a smartphone with the "mobile hotspot" or "tethering" feature turned on, or a Wi-Fi access point with a geostationary satellite uplink (such as HughesNet or Viasat/Exede).

Examples of metered wired Ethernet connections include a wired Ethernet connection with a geostationary satellite uplink.

NetworkManager on desktop Linux stores a setting for whether a connection is metered.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/364932/119806