The UK now has 735,000 unbundled phone lines in BT's local exchanges, but "planned quality levels" have not been met for Business As Usual lines (individual lines rather than bulk migrations), according to the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator's monthly report.

More worryingly, the delivery of backhaul in exchanges has deteriorated recently - so all those super-fast ADSL connections may find themselves with a super-fast connection to the shack at the end of their road with the exchange in it, and no further.

In a statement to ZDNet, Black said the August holidays had caused much of the disruption and was effusive in his praise of the Openreach management team.

Putting competitors' equipment into BT exchanges was never going to be a smooth process, and the speed with which demand has grown seems to have surprised everybody. It remains to be seen if Openreach can get the process back on schedule, and address the "specific systems, process and infrastructure problems" mentioned, but not detailed, in the report. ®

Related stories

• Ofcom mulls BT Openreach price hike (30 May 2008)
• Ofcom fills Local Loop Unbundling loophole (23 May 2007)
• European Commission beats telco open access drum (29 March 2007)
• BT promises to improve local loop services for rivals (27 October 2006)
• Less British, more telecoms please (14 September 2006)
• BT extends Fusion to corporate customers (14 September 2006)
• Orange broadband punters left stranded for weeks (11 August 2006)
• AOL UK chalks up 100k LLU lines (30 June 2006)
• UK LLU hits half million (15 June 2006)
• C&W sets sights on one million wholesale LLU lines (9 June 2006)