At the time of privatisation the world was a very different place, and it's aim was to increase service levels and stop people waiting 2 years to have a phone line installed. The idea of competition in the way we see it now wasn't really on the cards at that point. We are so used to the BT way of life the GPO way is long long long forgotten.

In reality there is little stopping any company from installing fibre anywhere it likes, BT, Openreach, Virgin, Cable & Wireless..... would all have to find the same funding to do the job. It isn't much cheaper just because Openreach has a 100 year old network to look after. Many local communities have installed their own broadband networks to solve the problem on their own, they bare the cost as Openreach/BT has it hands tied in what it can charge.

FTTC is not a product designed to run an entire office off, and I would suggest using it as such is a big risk. My day job used to be talking to people who had lost ADSL service for weeks sometimes, you'd be surprised just how much Openreach care about that for the money they make out of it, but in a product with so many weak points when it comes to redundancy when it's bad it can be really bad! The same can't be said for some of the SPs who just tend to play the blame BT game, which sadly is all too common.

Cheers

Cris