This does pose an interesting dilemma. Firstly - in this internet connected society, fully understand the frustration when the internet goes down for any extended period of time. It can definitely cause work to grind to a halt. 

Having worked in this field, a lot of planned maintenance is largely transparent with minimal impacts to the end customer. The maintenance is almost always communicated to the RSP's and the RSP's then have discretion on how to communicate it out. Dare I say, on the mobile front - there are cellsites being worked on nearly every day... the end customer impact in the vast majority of these cases is nil (as there is often secondary sites that subscriber devices will attach too). It becomes very difficult to identify who *might* stray into an impacted area although with a bit of effort, one could identify locals. Cellsites being out of service takes on a different meaning however when an area being served by a cellsite being pulled out of service for hours (eg. RBI sites). I think it is fair to say that most outages are designed to be as minimal as possible and there is generally no malice behind service outages.

With that in mind - how much becomes too much or too little?

Its a genuine question. 

There are two instances from Vector that spring to mind: 

• There was some planned substation capacity work that impacted our area, Vector sent us a letter stating that power supplies may be interrupted several times between 12PM-4PM on a specified day (well before lockdown). 
• Our smart meter is being upgraded to a 4G/5G model and sometime in the next 30 days, a tech will be arriving to swap the meters. Power won't be interrupted unless its an emergency.