Your posting about iCloud uploading is rather misguided. First off, this only happens if you enable iCloud Photo Library, which is an explicit decision, not something that happens automatically. And secondly, it actually uploads fairly slowly (it certainly doesn't use all the available bandwidth) and has a fairly low per-day upload cap. If you have 45GB of photos (which strikes me as rather extreme for your phone) it will actually take a fairly long time to upload them all. I'm not sure what the daily cap actually is, but I think it's on the order of a few gigabytes.
Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.
Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.