Re: "bankrupt"
As a personal example, I'm forced to have a BT phone line that I never actually use, for the sake of a pitiful 3 - 5 Mb/s ADSL connection (on a good day), and for the privilege of merely "renting the line", making exactly no calls ever, and receiving a trickle of data off the Internet, I'm expected to pay over £50 a month. Last year that same service cost me £40. Three years ago it cost just over £30.
Are you completely sure about those figures; you seem to be paying more for your ADSL than I do for VDSL (FTTC) which is giving me a speed faster than yours by a factor of 10.
They never based pricing on what would give a reasonable return, but on what they thought the customer would pay.
ISTR that BT made the same mistake over 20 years ago when the contract it had with the BBC for television circuits around the country was up for renewal. I didn't see the figures but IIRC Energis (remember them?) undercut them by some large margin. Mind you I don't think that ended particularly well...
Telephone boxes have never made a profit and presumably make even less now. And they are slowly but surely being withdrawn; a few near us must have cost more to empty of cash than was actually in them. Having said that BT had to provide them as a public service for emergency use but the ascendency of the mobile phone rendered them ever less necessary, and continues to do so. Yes we did / still do have to subsidise them, but it does no harm to think of that as some sort of insurance policy to guarantee being able to get help in an emergency.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
