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Openreach is a natural monopoly which owns the pipes and telephone cables that connect nearly all businesses and homes in the UK to the national broadband and telephone network. It is a subsidiary of BT Group. Since 2005, Openreach has become highly controversial on account of the UK's slow broadband speeds and the decreasing competitiveness of the UK's internet infrastructure. It has also suffered an extremely high number of customer complaints relating to poor service, although it does not communicate directly with its customers. Openreach was established in 2006 following an agreement between BT and 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. BT have been accused of abusing their control of Openreach, which generates most of BT's profits, particularly by underinvesting in the UK's broadband infrastructure, charging high prices and providing poor customer service. The UK's telecoms regulator Ofcom is currently investigating whether to order BT to sell Openreach, and is expected to report in January 2016. In 2009, BT announced Openreach would connect 2.5 million British homes to ultra-fast FTTP by 2012 and 25% of the UK. However, by the end of September 2015 only 250,000 homes were connected. Instead, BT offered an 'FTTP on Demand' product, but in January 2015, BT stopped taking orders for the on-demand product as the costs for FTTP on Demand were deemed "excessive" and unreasonable. The native Wholesale Broadband Connect version of FTTP has been rolled out to some parts of the UK, though the rollout is very slow and patchy. ==History== 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.〔OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS, FINAL STATEMENTS ON THE STRATEGIC REVIEW OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS, AND UNDERTAKINGS IN LIEU OF A REFERENCE UNDER THE ENTERPRISE ACT 2002, at 25–29 (2005), http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/ condocs/statement_tsr/ (U.K.). 〕 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. Today, the company is structured such that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of British Telecommunications plc (BT), which itself includes the four separately managed businesses and virtually all other assets of the BT Group. 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.〔(ECI's BT contract ) (Yedioth Ahronoth)〕 The deal was the largest in ECI's history. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Openreach」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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