Interestingly... in the UK... they did something similar to the DSL Provider / ISP split we did here in the states. So you could order cable service from one company and layer 3 from a completely different company. People tell me it's done wonders for competition there.
Well yes. Openreach were fixing a problem with my phone like yesterday, that’s generally a monopoly.
My layer 3 service is from A&A, which suits my needs. Other people probably wouldn’t want to chat with the engineers on IRC when there’s a problem though so they would go with talk talk or Bt or whatever.
Oh man. I would have LOVED to be able to talk to Lumen engineers via IRC a couple years ago. It took about 4 1/2 months to work through the army of script-reading CS reps to get to a manager who agreed to let me talk to a tier-2 rep who immediately put me in the queue for a callback from an engineer. Within 5 minutes of talking with THAT engineer, they had enough info to realize someone had mis-keyed my account number in one of their internal tools. It took another five minutes for them to correct it and within an hour my intarwebs were working fine. I suspect that had I been able to talk to a tier-2 engineer (even if via IRC) it would have taken at most a day to resolve.