Here’s a fix to those live tiles consuming unnecessary bandwidth...
Turn on Metered Connections (tells Windows 8 you’re on a connection with a limited bandwith plan) by going to the Charms (from the Start screen, not within an app) and select Settings. Click your Network Connection and it should open the Networks vertical bar. Then right-click your Connection and chose “Set as metered connection”. One caveat—this only works for Wireless Connections.
After this, go to the Settings of the Live tiles you disabled (you can enable them again) by opening the tile app, and then go to Charms and then Settings and then Tiles. In the Tiles popup, set the “Data used for tile updates” to a low number, like 1 MB per month. When it reaches the limit, it stops updating, but will tell you if there’s new data so you can manually pull it if you wish.
Thanks for that tip! This will prove useful with my limited data plan when I travel and have to tether my laptop to the phone.