" I'll sit there doing fuck all for a few years, taking the flak for doing telcos bidding."
This is _exactly_ the problem.
Ofcom have claimed fiefdom over what SHOULD be the Competition and Markets Authority's job instead of sticking to technical matters and the CMA have let them do so.
It was exactly the same situation in New Zealand that let things fester there for so long - a situation that only ended when their Ministry of Commerce parked tanks on the Telecom regulator's lawn and made it clear they weren't allowing the cozy wee self-congratulating shitshow to continue due to the degree of damage to the economy that had already been documented.
At that point the BT/Openreach model was offered and meekly accepted by NZ's Telco regulator.
The NZ MoC looked at it, documented BT's ongoing and egrarious UK market abuse and said "Yes this might work - but only if they are _completely separated_ dialtone/services and lines companies - and by the way you don't get any more broadband rollout funding until it happens. Hurry up."
The result is that NZ's version of Openreach is lean, mean, sells to all-comers and the NZ telecom market has changed from being a posterchild taught in many countries of how NOT to privatise your phone systems to a pretty good example of "doing it right".
Having said that, Chorus NZ is suffering from MBA disease already and faces prosecution for allowing contractors to pay below minimum wage, so nothing's perfect - but as a lines company which lives or dies on lines service it has a vested interest in making sure _ALL_ its customers are happy - the only unhappy one is the former Telecom NZ (Spark) which whines regularly about the costs being "too high" despite everyone else being happy they're less than half of what they used to be.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
