17 Facts About Openreach

1.

Openreach Limited is a company wholly owned by BT Group plc, that maintains the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone network.

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2.

Openreach manages BT's local access network which connects customers to their local telephone exchange, starting at the main distribution frame in the exchange and ending at the network termination point at the end user's premises.

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3.

The resulting organisation, Openreach, opened for business in January 2006 and reported directly to the BT chief executive.

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4.

Openreach engineers visit around 29,500 homes and offices every weekday on behalf of its customers, the CPs.

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5.

In July 2010 Openreach signed an £800 million contract with ECI Telecom to help it service and create a fibre-optic network serving 18 million households in the UK.

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6.

In 2017, Openreach proposed offering super-fast fibre broadband to 10 million homes by 2025, using fibre to the premises technology.

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7.

Openreach proposed making G fast-enabled broadband available to 12 million premises by 2020.

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8.

Meanwhile Openreach were connecting 8000 properties per week to FTTP with the aim of reaching 3 million premises by 2020, a target that was to increase following the publication of the Government's "Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review" and an increase in the supply of FTTP by alternative network ISPs.

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9.

Since 2005, Openreach has been criticised for its broadband speeds and for what its critics regard as the decreasing competitiveness of the UK's internet infrastructure, A study conducted in 2015 found that the UK had lower average speeds than Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Belgium, but higher average speeds than Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

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10.

Openreach has received a high number of customer complaints relating to poor service.

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11.

In March 2017 an investigation by Ofcom concluded that there were regulatory breaches at Openreach regarding the delivery of high-speed Ethernet cable services between January 2013 and December 2014.

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12.

Telecoms provider customers who have problems cannot directly contact Openreach and have to go indirectly through their service provider.

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13.

Openreach are accountable to each of the telecoms providers, as well as Ofcom.

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14.

In July 2014, Ofcom completed a review of Openreach's service, resulting in mandated performance levels on key services.

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15.

In December 2015 Ofcom indicated it was examining four options for Openreach's future: maintaining the current arrangement, more deregulation, structural separation from BT, or adjusting the current system.

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16.

In July 2017, Openreach began removing the BT element from its logo, and in September 2017 Openreach removed BT branding from its website.

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17.

On 31 July 2020, Openreach released a news article on their website showing their progress on their split from BT, with them updating "27,907 vehicles, 42 offices, 33,479 pass cards and 1,531 web pages" to reflect the change.

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