Maybe they're planning on selling those lines to a rural ISP like Frontier or Windstream. The price would have to be cheap as one is in bankruptcy and the other

Maybe they're planning on selling those lines to a rural ISP like Frontier or Windstream. The price would have to be cheap as one is in bankruptcy and the other just left it. More likely is that Starlink and competitors end up being good enough in rural areas to make DSL even less of a viable product than it is now. The government subsidizes these services but how long will that make sense for the government, the telecoms, or the customers?