Do you live in a jungle or something? Everywhere I've ever lived, including California during the Enron scandal, power outages were an order of magnitude less common than (non-power-outage-related) internet outages.

In Santa Clara County, at my home with Sonic.net Legacy DSL (AT&T DSLAM + ATM/Sonic.net IP), in the past 10 years, I can only recall two internet outages. In one, the telephone was out as well (a fiber cut between the remote terminal and the central office), the most recent one started around the same time as a 30 minute power outage.

In contrast, I've had several 30 minute to 2 hour power outages, and lots of power outages lasting less than a minute.

On the other hand, a short internet outage would not necessarily be noticed, because there's not a big change in ambient noise when the internet fails, nor do i have to reset the time on my appliances.

My power outages here in Austin seem to be around a couple per year. I think my Internet outages (outside of those resulting from me not having power) are less frequent, though I don't have logs checking.

Now, my Internet being slow...that's not uncommon at all. I've also had them randomly charge me an extra $50 "by mistake", as well directly and repeatedly lying to me about what services/packages are available.

I'm in central Austin, and so ready for Google Fiber. My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, and Internet outages are quite common for them, easily exceeding power outages.