[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...
OpenReach has to provide equal access to other ISPs by law, so the playing field between them is very even.
The only major outlier is Virgin Media, who own the cable (as in cable TV) network covering some built-up bits of the county; their fibre network is entirely separate.
Its only the last mile that they provide at any scale. the rest is arranged by the ISP
Incorrect. Virgin´s backbone is fiber and they own their own last mile. BT has been delivering FTTC and FTTH for some time now.
FTTC literally stands for "Fiber to the Curb"
Virgin use Coax for all its last mile stuff, save for some testing.
Of course the backhaul is fibre. but the local loop/ last mile is essentially all copper.
Openreach sells products only to ISPs, it won't deal with consumers at all. The main products it sells to ISPs are:
* ADSL last mile to a customer (in most places ASDL2+ but in some places it's plain ADSL because they never upgraded) at the maximum speed the line will do
* VDSL capped at 40Mbps down / 10Mbps up over last mile to a customer [in most but not all places, unless line is too long]
* VDSL capped at 80Mbps down / 20Mbps up [ditto]
* FTTP at 330, 500 or 1000 Mbps to the customer's premises. [ Only if there is actually a fibre, most won't have one]
* Line rental to make a physical line work with any of the above.
* Backhaul from the customer's exchange to your preferred POP where you take over the Internet access
A small ISP buys the line rental, backhaul, and one of the actual last mile packages, bundles that up with maybe some webmail and telephone support, and sells that as an Internet service for a nice margin. They need a POP somewhere vaguely sensible, with enough bandwidth to service their customers, and that's them done.
Bigger ISPs might arrange to have their own fibre at some exchanges, they don't buy backhaul from those exchanges, they pick up customer traffic themselves, but they buy everything else.
One interesting thing that you can see as a result of Openreach was that the true "line rental" cost Openreach were charging to make the line work was falling slowly over the years. But the _advertised_ line rental price had been rising enormously, because ISPs hid it in their small print. They'd say "Superfast Broadband only £5" and then in tiny print "(plus £20 pcm line rental, offer expires after 12 months, normal price £28 per month)"
This isn't just reserved to UK ISPs, afaik the situation in Germany is kinda similar. Fun tidbit about the monetization of features: When ADSL just became "a thing" it introduced higher latency compared to ISDN.
Quickly people figured out that certain ISPs could toggle something on called "fastpath", which would reduce the latency quite a bit if you called the support hotline and asked for it.
Took a couple of months until one of the major ISPs (Telekom) started charging 5€ monthly extra for it on the lower speed ADSL tariffs, luckily that stopped being a thing with VDSL.