Line rental charges from Openreach have been dropping year on year, the retail providers have been using increased line rental charges to lower the cost of broadband and hence get smaller numbers on the adverts, or to make it 'free'. And yes, BT as a retail provider are also guilty of this.
Sky like to talk about how total separation of Openreach is all about a noble cause of enabling a greater fibre deployment, but they haven't been able to back this claim up at any point - they trialled building a fibre network in York and declared the economics to not be viable. Any ISP that complains about the state of FTTP deployment and doesn't show any interest in existing Openreach FTTP products deserves further scrutiny of the reasons why they might be keen to put out press releases slamming Openreach whenever there's an opportunity. What Sky want is somebody else to front the cost of building an FTTP network, and for them to have regulated access to it. Failing that, legislation that gives BT less cash to bid for football rights is also OK by them. Never at any point believe that the claims from Vodafone/TalkTalk/Sky that their obsession with seeing Openreach split out from BT is about anything other than business.
Changing the ownership of Openreach from wholly-owned by BT to part owned by BT will not improve service, because there's no incentive to improve if you're still a monopoly provider. Openreach are far from perfect, but fiddling around with who owns them and what the prices are going to be regulated at does nothing for making large scale fibre deployments any more cost effective.
