The UK national newspapers are all featuring a story this week which would see Vodafone helping to pay for improved fiber for BT Openreach, the BT subsidiary which manages most of the UK broadband access network. While we are confident that such talks are taking place, we are not confident that a successful outcome can be reached, because the regulatory regime for fixed broadband in the UK is complicated. British Telecom has had to separate out the company Openreach from BT, so that arms’ length relationships can be observed for BT as well as all the other broadband providers, which offer unbundled or wholesaled broadband – including Sky, TalkTalk and to a lesser extent Virgin Media. Virgin is the only…