Openreach Engineer laying fibre in a duct as part of BT’s £2.5bn super-fast broadband programme.

Sky will on Monday call for a full competition inquiry into BT’s hold over the national telecoms network, marking the latest move in a long-running battle between the two companies.

In a formal submission to telecoms regulator Ofcom — which this year began its biggest review of the sector in a decade — Sky accuses BT’s Openreach division of a litany of service failures.

Sky argues there is a sufficient evidence against BT for Ofcom to ask the Competition and Markets Authority to conduct a full-blown competition inquiry.

Mai Fyfield, Sky’s chief strategy officer, said: “We are drawing attention to the problems in broadband because they are important to the economy as a whole.

“They affect competition between providers and have a direct impact on consumers and small businesses, resulting in inconvenience, dissatisfaction and loss of productivity.”

Sky and some of its peers including TalkTalk have long argued that BT should be forced to split off Openreach, a unit that operates the national broadband network. They accuse BT of underinvesting in Openreach and using its control over the national network to unfairly benefit its own retail operations.

In its submission to Ofcom, which will be published on Monday, Sky claims that Openreach misses more than 500 appointments each month to install new lines for Sky customers and fails to complete a further 4,000 jobs per month.

Sky also alleges that fault rates across Openreach’s network increased 50 per cent between 2009 and 2012, the last year for which reliable data are publicly available.

BT said: “The forthcoming Ofcom review is an important piece of work so it is disappointing that Sky are engaging in selective spin rather than constructive dialogue.”

The former telecoms monopoly said that its investment in Openreach was increasing and that Openreach has passed all 60 of the service targets it was set by Ofcom.

BT added that breaking its business apart “would lead to huge uncertainty and fundamentally undermine the case for future investment, dragging the UK backwards at the very time it needs important investment in its infrastructure”.

Sky’s submission to Ofcom is the latest in a series of spats with BT. The two companies have been fighting in the courts over whether Sky should be required to wholesale its key sports channels to its rivals.

Since 2013, BT has committed billions of pounds to sports rights as a way to attract broadband and television customers, eating into a market at the heart of Sky’s pay-TV business.

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