BT Openreach

Openreach Ltd.

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	2006
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	Mike McTighe (Chairman) Clive Selley (Chief Executive)
Revenue	£ 5.061 billion (2014)
Operating income	£ 1.195 billion (2014)
Number of employees	32,000
Parent	BT Group
Website	www.openreach.co.uk

Openreach is a subsidiary of telecommunications company BT Group that owns the pipes and telephone cables that connect nearly all businesses and homes in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone network.

It was established in 2006 following an agreement between BT and the UK's telecoms regulator Ofcom to implement certain undertakings, pursuant to the Enterprise Act 2002, to ensure that rival telecom operators have equality of access to BT's local network.

Openreach manages BT's local access network which connects customers to their local telephone exchange, starting at the main distribution frame (MDF) in the exchange and ending at the network termination point (NTP) at the end user's premises. Openreach also manages the connections between the MDF and the BT Wholesale/local-loop unbundling (LLU) termination points located in the exchange, often referred to as jumper connections.

In March 2017, BT Group agreed to Ofcom's demand to make Openreach a separate company, with its own staff and management.

Following the Telecommunications Strategic Review (TSR), in September 2005 British Telecom signed undertakings with Ofcom to create a separate division, for the purpose of providing equal access to BT’s local access network and backhaul products. Ofcom previously argued that BT had significant market power in the British telecommunications market, specifically in residential voice services, business retail services, leased lines, wholesale international services, and wholesale broadband and fixed narrowband services. The resulting organisation, Openreach, opened for business in January 2006 and reports directly into the BT chief executive.

The functional separation of Openreach from BT has had mixed results, according to economists J. Gregory Sidak and Andrew Vassallo, who have argued that while Openreach’s creation produced the short-run benefit of lower prices, it also led to long-run costs, such as declines in telecommunications investment, customer satisfaction, and measures of the United Kingdom’s global competitiveness in telecommunications.