Re: Up?
As long as BT is the incumbent telco with a lines business AND a dialtone/broadband business you can guarantee it will do exactly what it can to ensure that it benefits the most from LLU rules.
By withholding network upgrades in profitable areas it forces clients into the loving arms of....BT. There may be a (quite leaky) chinese wall in place between the lower levels, but in the end Openreach dances to the tune of strategies set by BT head office.
The New Zealand example is worth looking at. By forcing the incumbent to divest its lineside into a completely separate private company, it's moved in 18 months from being a poster child for how NOT to privatise your telco (rampant anticompetitive behaviour, etc)(*), to one of the most vibrant markets in the world.
The newly independent lines company is not only selling access to copper and dark fibre (first time ever), it's also leasing out duct space to companies which would previously have had NO access to them (direct competitors and cable companies, etc) which is resulting in less streetwork.
The effect on LLU has been startling, partly because it hasn't just starting offering this kind of "equal physical access" without administrative roadblocks and via a hell of a lot of expensive hoop-jumping, it's actively going out and soliciting business instead of hiding out the back in such a way that it's hard to deal with and get things done.
Unless and until the UK govt bites the bullet and forces BT to divest its lines company, the UK telecommunications market will remain difficult to deal with and keep having these not-spots (it's not Openreach which refuses to put stuff in notspots, it's BT head office, etc)
Mind you, it could be worse - the USA market is staggeringly corrupt and locked down.