Windows 10 data usage a problem

Several articles have documented problems with Windows 10 data usage this year (do a quick google on Windows 10 data usage), and I had suspected this was due to settings done wrong by the user (or missed due to Microsoft's subtle install process with privacy options not apparent to a user).  I recently moved several rural businesses to Windows 10 who run off a mobile stick, and found not only does Windows 10 eat through data, it continues to do so even after turning off contact sharing options, blocking location sharing, blocking internet history sharing, enabling a metered connection to theoretically block updates, and essentially disabling all aspects of what should be the external communications by the OS.  Our findings?  Still massive amounts of connections and data usage happening, still hitting data limits inside of 14 days with 1 laptop and 1 desktop on Windows 10 through 1 SaskTel Mifi connection.  In a basic test we used a single Surface Pro 3 with a Telus mobility stick that could show us the bandwidth used.  After boot up, we turned on the internet, logged in to Edge, checked email in Outlook, sent 2 boring text emails, turned off Internet.  Usage:  over 100 MB.  In February of this year a company tested this due to widespread complaints, and found over 5500 connection requests by Windows 10 after all these settings were done.  Microsoft's answer:  they are not gathering confidential information, just bugs, data for debugging, etc...but the OS is clearly a bandwidth hog, and is clearly transmitting more than what the user believes they are sending.

It seems to me that Microsoft has designed Windows 10 around a world of people with unlimited internet.  Do NOT deploy this OS to your bandwidth limited clients, we are sadly now reverting our rural Windows 10 clients to Windows 7, where we could at least control what was being communicated from the OS across a WAN and control when and where to do updates.