One of the more thought-provoking speakers at the Mahindra Satyam event (see here) was BT Retail CIO, Colin Lees, who observed that consumers were increasingly predisposed to seeking a 'one-stop shop' for all their communication and TV services. This has made consumers more sensitive to disruption in their broadband service; Lees made the point that the phones start ringing at BT's call centres within 30 seconds of a service interruption, though he said that the threshold was even lower for small businesses relying on BT's internet service.
Maybe I'm not typical then. My comms services are a 'three stop shop' (Virgin Media for broadband, Sky for TV and fixed-line phone, and Vodafone for mobile) so that I don't have all my increasingly mission- and entertainment-critical eggs in one basket. And frankly I can tolerate an internet outage of several minutes to my TechMarketView internet service before I get twitchy (we have email and CRM in the 'cloud') whereas even a 10 second outage on my TV service (never yet happened) could mean me missing the potting of a crucial black in the snooker (yeah, sad, I know!).
The increasing delivery of TV over the internet (to the home or mobile) will provide a huge service level challenge to ISPs, who have traditionally treated consumers as 'poor relations' to their business service customers. I have this experience myself with Virgin Media; I am one of the apparently many consumer customers who are suffering from a 'server utilisation' problem which reduces my 100 megabit service to less than 10 megabits on evenings and weekends. This is a problem Virgin said they don’t think they can fix before November – but at least they have halved my bill till then. As this is not affecting my business use I will live with it at least for now. But as competition in this space gets more aggressive, and more entertainment is consumed over the internet, all ISPs will surely have to lift their game.