The functional separation of Openreach from BT has had mixed results, according to economists J. Gregory Sidak and Andrew Vassallo, who have argued that while Openreach’s creation produced the short-run benefit of lower prices, it also led to long-run costs, such as declines in telecommunications investment, customer satisfaction, and measures of the United Kingdom’s global competitiveness in telecommunications.

[9] In June 2017, Openreach demonstrated its version of G.fast technology, using "side pods" that can be bolted on to existing cabinets to offer potential UK broadband speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s.

[21] BT have been accused of abusing their Openreach monopoly,[22] which generated almost 35% of operating profits in 2016,[citation needed] particularly by underinvesting in the UK's broadband infrastructure,[23] charging high prices and providing poor customer service.

[24] In January 2016, a cross-party report by the British Infrastructure Group of MPs, working from data from the Office for National Statistics, found that around 5.7 million broadband customers in the UK had internet connections that did not reach Ofcom's acceptable minimum speed of 10 Mbit/s.

[26] The government subsequently made a proposal for a universal service obligation (USO) granting remote households the right to request broadband speeds of at least 10 Mbit/s.

[9] In March 2017 an investigation by Ofcom concluded that there were regulatory breaches at Openreach regarding the delivery of high-speed Ethernet cable services between January 2013 and December 2014.

In 2015, BT consulted on the possibility of allowing Openreach to deal directly with consumers, which would have required the approval of Ofcom, but withdrew the proposal, partly due to objections from other service providers.

[29] In August 2015, Labour MP Chris Bryant called for Openreach to be split from BT, criticising the infrastructure and stating that it is too slow to fix faults and install new lines.

[30] BT Group's acquisition of mobile phone operator EE, which received regulatory approval in October 2015, was partly funded using £1.7bn of Openreach's revenues.

[32] In January 2016, a report backed by 121 cross-party MPs stated Ofcom should force BT to sell off its Openreach division to open up competition.

[39] On 31 July 2020, Openreach released a news article on their website showing their progress on their split from BT, with them updating "27,907 vehicles, 42 offices, 33,479 pass cards and 1,531 web pages" to reflect the change.

[41][42] Between 2010 and 2012 the UK intelligence community initiated an investigation aimed at Huawei, with increasing urgency after the US, Canada and Australia prevented the company from operating in their countries.

[43] On 16 December 2012 David Cameron was supplied with a in-depth report indicating that the intelligence services had very grave doubts regarding Huawei, in that the UK governmental, military, business community and private citizen's privacy may be under serious threat.

[44] On 7 June 2013, a report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament concluded that BT should never have allowed the Chinese company access to the UK's critical communications network without ministerial oversight, saying they were "deeply shocked" that BT did not inform government that they were allowing Huawei and ZTE, which both have ties to the Chinese military, unfettered access to critical national systems.

Huawei is not permitted to supply the telecoms market in the US and a number of other countries because of concerns that its products include "backdoors" which could allow Chinese security services access to the equipment.