"I am with Virgin and in my area you can choose between two - OpenReach infrastructure and Virgin media infrastructure."
The difference is that Openreach will likely provide a 24Mbps ADSL/76Mbps VDSL service (and maybe more) to compete with the various Virgin offerings.
In America, if you find one of the lucky locations, you'll have 2Mbps ADSL or the cable offerings. In towns and cities. It's even worse in rural areas. Remember dial up and 14k4 because the line doesn't support higher speeds? Mobile data it is then...