Re: Ofcom continures to be utterly useless.
"All Openreach has to worry about is a bit of competition from Virgin"
You are blurring BT wholesale/retail and Openreach (lines and ducts), either deliberately or naively.
Virgin is an ideal Openreach CUSTOMER, not competitor - as are all telcos with in-ground infrastructure.
The day Openreach is fully independent is the day you'll see Openreach salespeople actively approaching outfits like Virgin offering to lease out duct space so Virgin doesn't have to spend 50k/mile to dig up roads - which is the primary barrier to rolling out CATV to every cul-de-sac in the country and can simply run them down openreach trenches instead.
They'd also be offering to maintain Virgin (or other telco) outside plant for XYZ facilities management fees and leasing space in that 3rd party ducting.
They'd ALSO be providing leased lines WITHOUT demanding that BT wholesale NTUs be attached to each end of the pair (this is one of the classic incumbent telco rent-seeking behaviours that dramatically drives up costs for 3rd parties) and actively seeking dark fibre customers.
Why do I say this? Because this is exactly what's happened in New Zealand, where Chorus was entirely split off from Telecom New Zealand (now Spark) - and it turned out that the pensions liabilities were a fiction, along with the high costs that TCNZ (and BT) claimed are incurred for operating the outside plant network (When the company is part of the group, you can use creative accounting to siphon out money)
An entirely independent Openreach (independent headquarters, board, shares and management) with regulated line charges to all and restrictions on shareholding to prevent any kind of predatory aquisition (as a Strategic National Interest, this is justifiable and legal) has the potential to have the same galvanising effect on the market on the UK's comfortable triopoly as it had in New Zealand's comfortable duopoly.
Interestingly, 6 years on from the split, the old NZ dialtone company is in trouble, having had its credit rating slashed not long after the split, whilst the lines company had its one upgraded (the exact opposite of the FUD scenario it and BT put out). As with New Zealand, in the event of a fully independent Openreach, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see BT crying "poor us" a couple of years down the track, demanding special concession rates because the Openreach charges are "far too high", despite all the other companies being happy with them.
I'm not saying the NZ model is perfect - Chorus' regulated copper rates have been set too low recently and the company is stinging a bit as a result - what isn't helping is that the low rates are discouraging the stated objective of getting all clients migrated off copper and onto fibre.