BT agrees to legal separation of Openreach

[Top_gun]

It's time bloody Ofcom was disbanded.

Perhaps it's time Ofcom is given more teeth.

[Gerrard]

In areas where threes a high population density and they can get a fast return on investment - especially has they don't have to provide a maintained 999 service.

And this is why I think it should be nationalised, just like the Post Office should be. You can't really have "fair" competition when you saddle one company with a responisibility like this and maintain competitiveness against other companies that pick and choose the more profitable areas/routes.

[Ozaron]

Okay, here we go, I'll try not to waste all of your time...

The annual budget for OpenReach will still be set by BT so I doubt very much is going to change at all. Investment in consumer fibre connections will still be little to non existent and the company will probably be run into the ground as much as possible.

Not sure about little to nonexistent, I've been watching intently and while investment is nowhere near as high as you'd see from, perhaps, investment in fresh new London tower block apartments that nobody will buy, it's still bigger than ever. The government and, as extensions, councils have been pooling money for a while now. It's in the interest of rural areas to upgrade their broadband and get connected in all senses because otherwise even more people will want to leave, modern life seems to make these things a necessity.

Perfect example is O2 that my power company uses for their smart meters... it 'says' 3 bars but can't connect lol. Soon as the installer said he couldn't connect and said the sim was O2 my first response was you're screwed, you don't get a signal here.

Norfolk is still dreadful when it comes to mobile signal good enough for data imo, at least my village has been fibre enabled so I can get high speed data at home if I want it.

I'm not with O2 but my phone uses them as a carrier. They are no worse for me than my old Vodaphone sim was, but I can confirm that their network has some real oddities in my bit of Norfolk. Got a dead spot near where I live, in the middle of a town, and I can make calls, hear people, but they can barely (if at all) hear me, and my data signal is completely dead. Back at home, my data works in some places in my house very well, and not at all in others. Phone signal is... bad.

Depends why you havent been upgraded.

Is your cabinet serving too few lines? Is it not economically viable to actually upgrade it? Is it just mostly phone users? Are locals blocking the upgrade?

These things are unlikely to change, and Openreach is more than likely going to have less money and less interest in upgrading without BT, Sky, Talk Talk etc actively throwing cash at them for speculative upgrades.

Well, Openreach has my exchange listed down for "planned full upgrade" or similar by end of summer time, which would end more than a decade of DSL based sadness. I have to assume that it's because not enough people were on it, but I actually have a sneaky suspicion it's more to do with a lack of infrastructure to get it here in the first place. Not really been long since they actually got fibre into Norwich, so getting it to the rural areas around the city has taken even longer than usual. We're on just one of the less "important" exchanges.

Really the infrastructure shuold be a state asset with a clear NFP strategy behind it - but this lot currently running the show would baulk at such a view. They'd rather sell it off to the highest bidder then claim innocence when they exploit consumers.

NFP, maybe. Allowing the state to just spy on us all via hardware they control and monitor, rather than at least having to put pins in the private sector doll, no.

And this is why I think it should be nationalised, just like the Post Office should be. You can't really have "fair" competition when you saddle one company with a responisibility like this and maintain competitiveness against other companies that pick and choose the more profitable areas/routes.

As someone whose connectivity has been let down massively by BT's decision to pick and choose exchanges for some lovin', I disagree. I used to think that state ownership would benefit us all, and compared to what we have that's probably still true. But if Openreach was just an ENTIRELY seperate organisation, who were forced by Ofcom to give every ISP the same deal, and operated like a private firm, that would be alright too. As long as their prices were also monitored by Ofcom. They'd just have to focus on using profits to invest in infrastructure, and keeping a workforce around who are actually capable of doing their job. (I've heard from the last engineer that they took on so many people to fill the workforce deficit, that many of them don't know how to do their jobs and aren't being trained to spec - causing more problems than they might have had otherwise..)

[BobF64]

And this is why I think it should be nationalised, just like the Post Office should be. You can't really have "fair" competition when you saddle one company with a responisibility like this and maintain competitiveness against other companies that pick and choose the more profitable areas/routes.

This is one of the reasons I find "BTs" price structure to be daft.

Where there is competition, ie other unbundled line suppliers in an exchange, the price for broadband supply is cheapest.
Where BT is the only supplier, it costs the most.

So those being "punished" by having BT as the only option are subsidising those that BT have had to cut the price for to avoid losing customers.

With Openreach separated off, everyone will have to pay the same, as Openreach should be selling the lines at the same price to everyone, so price increases for most!

[ALFRDO]

they agreed 'legal separation' because they were close to being forced into it.
anyway this does not mean much - BT still owns OPENREACH. The real problem is that BT (thru openreach) is milking the british people of money with a rent for old COPPER cables while they receive government subsidies to install fiber.