This is the problem they face, they can't abandon it, they have to provide service, they bought a RBOC, just like when Centurylink bought Qwest, it came with certain Federal and State responsibilities. To get approval of sale I am sure they had to tell these entities that the service would be there and maintained. This is why Puckett said it was a mistake. The inverted Hostile takeover if you want to call it that by L3 is going to have the same issues and learning curve. You can't muscle States and Federal people. They can however let it deteriorate and become unusable, which appears to be the case and then sell that portion off if they can. Verizon did that with Frontier. Will be harder now that the Frontier situation imploded and they had to file Bankruptcy over it. Who will want to buy something that was left to fall apart to get out of.
This is going to be a problem going forward, when the FCC starts fining for lack of essential services or outages on the Network side there will be a lot of pressure put on to correct issues and then have corrective action, which means more routines and tests and data to prove they are performing the maintenance as a settlement. Vicious spiral, really. Nobody wants to maintain anything. That's just not a Telecom situation, it's highways, Electrical grid infrastructure, just about everything that's backbone essential nationally.