Be and maintenance

As you may recall, I swapped my ISP to Be recently. They're still providing the same download speed as before - 4.5Mbps, which isn't as good as the 24Mbps they suggested i might get but much better than Zen's 1Mbps. I'm starting to get annoyed by Be's “planned outages”. Since I've taken the service on the 19th May, there have been three planned outages of the services, lasting several hours, during which they've conducted “necessary maintenance”. I don't recall BT every having to do any maintenance on the exchange before, so quite what Be's doing, I don't know. But it's starting to irritate.