Outside of the outrage over "borrowing" the bandwidth on my WAN connection (which I agree is wrong to have on by default), how much of a help is this feature for distributing updates over the LAN?
For example, I installed and fully updated Win 10 on my Surface. Soon I'll be traveling to the bandwidth-deprived middle of nowhere to visit my family and will likely be updating their systems to 10 while I'm there. If I connect my Surface to their network, will the install and update process on their machine automatically look for my Surface and pull updates from there, rather than spend hours trying to download over a sub 3Mbps connection?
Having "PCs on my local network and PCs on the Internet" on by default is not cool, but allowing "PCs on my local network" could be a huge help for situations like this.
to some extent, not all updates work like this, and the updates live in your cache only for a limited time (mostly dependent on the storage capacity).
Pretty much as long as the update can be uninstalled (usually 30 days or so) the update package will be in your cache.
If the update package is compatible with the SKU of other machines in your network (language, version, bitness etc.) then they might pull it from your machine instead of the internet.
The local network only version (which is the default for Enterprise versions of Windows 10) does seem like pretty unambiguously a good thing. Even if it doesn't completely eliminate duplicated update downloads it should significantly reduce them.
For example, I installed and fully updated Win 10 on my Surface. Soon I'll be traveling to the bandwidth-deprived middle of nowhere to visit my family and will likely be updating their systems to 10 while I'm there. If I connect my Surface to their network, will the install and update process on their machine automatically look for my Surface and pull updates from there, rather than spend hours trying to download over a sub 3Mbps connection?
Having "PCs on my local network and PCs on the Internet" on by default is not cool, but allowing "PCs on my local network" could be a huge help for situations like this.