Is BT and Openreach a monopoly?
Posted by BathInternational105@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 29 comments
Just signed a new contract with a provider. They mentioned that no matter which company we sign with, there is only one provider in the UK for all broadbands and phone lines; Openreach (owned by BT). Does this count as a monopoly? Is it legal? Thanks in advance, I’m just clueless.
eionmac@reddit
Yes. To duplicate the BT network of wires would cost a very great amount of money (in Thousands of Billions!) so all wires except Virgin are on BT lines. (Only the switchgear at exchanges is different). Virgin 'cherry picked' the very close city structures and use BT lines for rural areas.
Mdl8922@reddit
Are CityFibre not on different lines? They've just dug the whole village up to give us Toob Internet, so I assumed they have their own cables too.
eionmac@reddit
From houses to nearest exchange. they will as all others use the BT 'Backbone' network.
Signal-Ad2674@reddit
Wrong.
ThePolymath1993@reddit
Other than fibre broadband and Hull being a weird anomaly, BT own basically all the Telco infrastructure in the country. So yes.
BathInternational105@reddit (OP)
Openreach have announced all PSTN and copper connections are being terminated next year. It’ll all be fibre and digital voice from then on!
jimicus@reddit
Openreach own a lot of fibre, and more-or-less have a monopoly over the last mile (the bit from your house to the exchange).
sigsaurusrex@reddit
at least enough of a monopoly that they apparently don't have any consumer pressure to fix broken cables for weeks...
TC_FPV@reddit
They've extended that to 2027
sigsaurusrex@reddit
all i know is that openreach has enough of a monopoly base to not fix cables for weeks at a time
terryjuicelawson@reddit
There are others, like Hull has its own. Virgin for cable. It is not like no other companies can have a comms network. What the provider really means is that no matter what company you go for with your home broadband, the underlying infrastructure is maintained by BT openreach.
welly_wrangler@reddit
There are plenty of other cable providers - virgun, gigaclear, cityfibre etc etc
FredH3663@reddit
Openreach does not supply or bill you the consumer
Fukthisite@reddit
BT and Virgin.
Virgin have their own exclusive lines and everyone else uses Openreach.
Mdl8922@reddit
CityFibre also.
Djinjja-Ninja@reddit
It's complicated.
BT Consumer (who supply BT Broadband) and Openreach are separate entities both being wholly owned by The BT Group.
Openreach own the cables, BT Consumer provide the service over them. Officially the rules operate as such so that BT Broadband have to talk to Openreach as would any other provider such as Sky or PlusNet or any other ISP that uses the old copper cabling in the roads.
It used to be that the only outlier to this (other than Hull which is weird in its own right) was Virgin (previously NTL/Telewest etc), who have their own cabling infrastructure, but it is much different these days with the rise of lots of other companies running their own fibre (Grain, CityFibre etc).
As such, in the broadband space at least, it is not really a monopoly as at a consumer level you have lots of choice, hundreds of ISPs using Openreach infrastructure and usually at least 1 or 2 others that have their own infrastructure.
NortonBurns@reddit
I didn't realise Hull were still in that outlier territory that must have started back in the Rediffusion & white phone box era. TIL.
Djinjja-Ninja@reddit
It's been that way since the beginning, there is literally no BT/Openreach infrastructure, unlike all other local/regional telecoms companies they were never absorbed into the GPO and stayed independent the entire time.
To this day it's all still run by the KCOM Group.
One_Loquat_3737@reddit
It used to be the case that The Post Office ran all communications in the UK (pretty much), mail, telephony the lot. It was a state-owned monopoly that gradually got privatised and broken up and introduced to limited additional competition. OpenReach is a regulated monopoly (more or less), one of the remnants of that, since very few companies wanted to or would have replaced all the copper lines to homes that remained from when the Post Office ran it all.
davus_maximus@reddit
If I remember rightly, BT and its Post Office/GPO predecessors had built the whole UK telecoms infrastructure and at the very beginning of the ADSL boom in 2006, they were forced by Ofcom to open up their exchanges to other companies, in a process called Local Loop Unbundling. Ofcom did this as an anti-monopoly measure while bowing to lobbying pressures from private industry. Openreach was the spin-off subcompany that was founded as a result.
Some exchanges got designated "hostels", where they've had to host racks of backbone equipment belonging to the likes of Sky, Talktalk etc.
You want another copper/fibre connection to your house? You'll need to physically build it.
To give them credit, Openreach respond to fault tickets reasonably well. Parent company BT, on the other hand, continue to be a customer-service basketcase.
AdrenalineAnxiety@reddit
Yup, even Ofcom have said so and made legal attempts to separate them. If you google Ofcom BT Openreach you should be able to read about their reasoning.
BathInternational105@reddit (OP)
Damn, so what’s gonna happen now? The gov is just gonna let them control the market? Or is Ofcom gonna introduce regulations?
Djinjja-Ninja@reddit
That was back in 2017.
Mediocre-Opinion@reddit
Fibre-optic companies (altnets) are making in roads into the monopoly but realistically we are stuck with OR in most areas of the country.
Al-Calavicci@reddit
Gigaclear for rural areas are one, plus obviously Virgin. Although we use 4G (can’t get 5G) and that’s plenty fast enough for streaming UHD.
But yea, if it’s coming through a phone line it’s Openreach.
Evari@reddit
Openreach are the only organisation with a universal service obligation to provide broadband to everyone, but there are lots of different companies running fibre to peoples houses. Virgin media and city fibre are probably the two biggest.
There’s also more to being an ISP than running a cable to someone’s house. How big are the cables that your isp has to Google, Netflix, and other isps? Do they have a large team of people monitoring their network and responding to issues and outages? To say everyone’s on openreach and it doesn’t matter which isp you choose is ignoring a lot.
WALL-G@reddit
There are smaller providers out there who don't use Openreach, though they might use some of the ducting if it's present.
YouFibre are an example. I pay £32 a month for 1gig symmetrical with a static IP.
Tim-Sanchez@reddit
It is virtually a monopoly, but it's not quite true that they're the only provider. Virgin have their own lines for broadband for example, and so do a handful of smaller companies.
AutoModerator@reddit
Please help keep AskUK welcoming!
Top-level comments to the OP must contain genuine efforts to answer the question. No jokes, judgements, etc.
Don't be a dick to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
This is a strictly no-politics subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.