What makes you think it's competition that's dying. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to more areas, so their previous DSL subscribers are now upgrading to fiber.
Citation on Fios expansion? AFAIK, they've been holding steady with their existing mid-atlantic footprint (DC, Maryland, Delaware, PA, NJ, NY), and sold off everything else to Frontier in 2015. I believe their reasoning was that they could offer 4G to areas currently served by aging DSL lines, so there was no reason to upset the shareholders by spending money on physical infrastructure for fiber expansion.
Didn't Verizon sell a lot of their DSL subs to Frontier Communications?