Regulator nudges broadband market, hopes competition will turn up in 2031

Ofcom is laying out its pathway for fiber broadband almost everywhere across the UK in five years, but concedes that BT still dominates the market.

Britain's communications regulator today published its Telecoms Access Review for 2026-31, following on from the last review in 2021. That put in place a regulatory framework aimed at boosting investment and competition in the wholesale market for consumer broadband services.

The updated document basically tinkers around the edges, tweaking a few things here and there while largely keeping the existing regulations unchanged.

Ofcom says that it recognizes that BT, the former state-owned telco, still has "significant market power" (SMP) in a number of markets, and so will continue to impose regulations on Openreach, its infrastructure arm, to address its monopoly-like influence.

This means keeping rules that require Openreach to let other network firms access its utility poles and underground ducts to deploy new fiber ...