While the outage is obviously badly timed, heavy penalties for service outages will have unexpected outcome.
The expected outcome, of course, is that they're willing to pay more to put more resilience into the system in order to avoid the fines. This will sort of work, although it's likely that you'll see such costs passed onto the consumer.
The unexpected outcome is that the management team will start of have an unhealthy relationship with risk, suddenly upgrades are too risky to do, they end up on old software upgrades. Capacity upgrades are also risky, so they hold off on the capacity upgrades because they don't have financial penalties for capacity problems, but they do for outages.
The other problem is expectation of uninterrupted service on a consumer line. It's just not realistic that consumer services have 100% uptime; get a backup (4G router is cheap enough)
It's a free market, and IMHO the best thing you can do is jump ship if you don't like it. Virgin have had poor reliability with opaque service status messages (Our engineers are working to fix the problem as soon as possible...) since before they were virgin...
We moved to AAISP and are happier for it. Yes, some outages, normally very quick to advise of issues and generally pretty transparent with what went wrong and what they're doing to fix it. (Except DDOS attacks, for obvious reasons)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
