Most of the non-microwave only sites were converted to fiber, so they're out there quietly humming in the night, soldiering on, just passing traffic, their facilities which were designed to be manned 24/7, might see an engineer once a week, or even once a month.

I've often dreamed about building a private national microwave network to sell capacity on. They're not expensive to build or operate with modern hardware, which doesnt need much power or servicing.

Wanna see something truly wild?

https://archive.org/details/bstj56-10-1829

Buried waveguide! a path not taken, as fast as microwave, with more controlled path characteristics. Had fiber not worked out to be practical, this would have been the replacement for the L-5 Coax network, as fiber proved to be.