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How can I detect whether the current connection is marked as metered on a system with NetworkManager?
This is from a shell script, but I can easily call any C functions via Python.
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Select Start > Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Manage known networks. Select the Wi-Fi network > Properties > turn on Set as metered connection.
Windows detects connection as metered from 802.11 (Wi-Fi) beacons and probe responses. This means Windows will only see fast Wi-Fi connection and will not see that there is a slow 3G modem behind it. Solution is to tell Windows device that Wi-Fi connection should be treated as metered connection.
A metered network is an internet plan where you pay to use a certain amount of data per month or per day and then pay a fee (usually around $10) for using more than your allotted data. Sometimes there's an option to throttle –– slow down and limit –– your data instead of charging for more data usage.
With the nmcli utility, the necessary steps are:
verify NetworkManager is version 1.0.6+:
$ nmcli -v
nmcli tool, version 1.9.0
check GENERAL.METERED on an interface:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.METERED dev show eth1
GENERAL.METERED:unknown
values are: unknown, yes, no, yes (guessed), no (guessed)
Forcing the value is done like this:
$ nmcli dev modify wlan1 connection.METERED yes
Connection successfully reapplied to device 'wlan1'
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.METERED dev show wlan1
GENERAL.METERED:yes
And, to get a list grouped by device:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.DEVICE,GENERAL.METERED dev show
GENERAL.DEVICE:wlan1
GENERAL.METERED:yes
GENERAL.DEVICE:eth1
GENERAL.METERED:unknown
GENERAL.DEVICE:lo
GENERAL.METERED:unknown
Trying to cut this down to info on just the default route would still require a call to another command as NetworkManager doesn't try to distinguish between multiple devices in a connected state:
$ nmcli -t -f GENERAL.DEVICE,GENERAL.METERED dev show `ip route list 0/0 | sed -r 's/.*dev (\S*).*/\1/g'`
You can also get the metered status of the current connection via D-Bus. From a shell, you can use busctl:
busctl get-property org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager Metered
which is only one command, in contrast to the nmcli solution, and in other programming languages it can be more efficient to use D-Bus directly instead of having to call nmcli.
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