Ofcom officially releases BT from its Openreach undertakings

Measures BT undertook in 2005 to placate Ofcom over its wholesale operations are officially no longer relevant, so it doesn’t need to bother.

This seems to be a bit of a formality, since the legal separation of Openreach from BT is supposed to mean BT has no direct influence over the fixed line wholesaler. But at the very least it marks a milestone in BT’s relationship with Ofcom and gives Philip Jansen one less thing to worry about when he takes over next year.

The previous milestone was the official transfer of 31,000 staff from BT Group to Openreach at the start of this month. “This is an important day for Openreach as we’re fulfilling the commitments to Ofcom under the Digital Communications Review,” said Openreach Chairman Mike McTighe at the time. “Openreach now has its own Board, greater strategic and operational independence, a separate brand and an independent workforce – and we’re ambitious for the future.”

The long and short of it seems to be that Openreach now has a separate and distinct relationship with Ofcom and will be assessed solely on its own merits, with no BT baggage. This is probably good news for everyone and is ultimately what all this ‘legal separation’ business is supposed to be about. It should also protect Openreach from accusations of favouring BT. You can read the full statement here.

A possible manifestation of this new, unfettered Openreach may have been the announcement last week that it is dropping the price of full fibre broadband infrastructure to new homes by 75%. Openreach got a nice lot of kudos from public figures for doing its bit to improve fibre coverage, so job done there.