Products and Services Revenue

9 Months Ended

Sep. 30, 2019

Revenue from Contract with Customer [Abstract]

We are an integrated communications company engaged primarily in providing an array of communications services, including local voice, broadband, private line (including business data services), Ethernet, network access, information technology and other ancillary services. We strive to maintain our customer relationships by, among other things, bundling our service offerings to provide our customers with a complete offering of integrated communications services.

We categorize our products, services and revenue among the following six categories:


•	IP and Data Services, which include primarily VPN data networks, Ethernet, IP and other ancillary services;


•	Transport and Infrastructure, which include broadband, private line (including business data services) and other ancillary services;


•	Voice and Collaboration, which includes primarily local voice, including wholesale voice, and other ancillary services;


•	IT and Managed Services, which include information technology services and managed services, which may be purchased in conjunction with our other network services;

•

Regulatory Revenue, which consist of Universal Service Fund ("USF") and Connect America Fund ("CAF") support payments and other operating revenue. We receive federal support payments from both federal and state USF programs and from the federal CAF program. These support payments are government subsidies designed to reimburse us for various costs related to certain telecommunications services including the costs of deploying, maintaining and operating voice and broadband infrastructure in high-cost rural areas where we are not able to fully recover our costs from our customers; and


•	Affiliate Services, we provide to our affiliates, telecommunication services that we also provide to external customers. In addition, we provide to our affiliates computer system development and support services, network support and technical services.

From time to time, we may change the categorization of our products and services.

Our operating revenue for our products and services consisted of the following categories:



	Three Months Ended September 30,			Nine Months Ended September 30,
	2019		2018	2019	2018
	(Dollars in millions)
IP and Data Services	$	169	155	467	459
Transport and Infrastructure	716		739	2,140	2,215
Voice and Collaboration	405		449	1,250	1,369
IT and Managed Services	—		1	2	5
Regulatory Revenue	48		53	143	161
Affiliate Services	701		752	2,143	2,171
Total operating revenue	$	2,039	2,149	6,145	6,380

We recognize revenue in our consolidated statements of operations for certain USF surcharges and transaction taxes that we bill to our customers. Our consolidated statements of operations also reflect the offsetting expense for the amounts we remit to the government agencies. The USF surcharges are assigned to the products and services categories based on the underlying revenue. We also act as a collection agent for certain other USF and transaction taxes that we are required by government agencies to bill our customers, for which we do not record any revenue or expense because we only act as a pass-through agent.

The following table provides the amount of USF surcharges and transaction taxes:



	Three Months Ended September 30,			Nine Months Ended September 30,
	2019		2018	2019	2018
	(Dollars in millions)
USF surcharges and transaction taxes	$	33	28	91	93