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Products and Services Revenues
 9 Months Ended
Sep. 30, 2016
Segment Reporting [Abstract]  
Products and Services Revenues
Products and Services Revenues
We are an integrated communications company engaged primarily in providing an array of services, including local voice, broadband, private line (including special access), network access, Ethernet, information technology, video 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.
From time to time, we may change the categorization of our products and services. During the second quarter of 2016, we determined that because of declines due to customer migration to other strategic products and services, certain of our services, specifically our private line (including special access) services, are more closely aligned with our legacy services than with our strategic services. As a result, we reflect these operating revenues as legacy services, and we have reclassified certain prior period amounts to conform to this change. The revision resulted in a reduction of revenue from strategic services and a corresponding increase in revenue from legacy services of $201 million and $627 million for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2015, respectively.
We categorize our products, services and revenues among the following three categories:
•
Strategic services, which include primarily broadband, Ethernet, video and other ancillary services;
•
Legacy services, which include primarily local voice, private line (including special access), Integrated Services Digital Network ("ISDN") (which use regular telephone lines to support voice, video and data applications), switched access, traditional wide area network ("WAN") (which allow a local communications network to link to networks in remote locations) and other ancillary services; and
•
Affiliates and other services, which consist primarily of CAF support payments, USF support payments, USF surcharges and services we provide to our affiliates. We receive federal support payments from both CAF Phase 1 and CAF Phase 2 programs and support payments from both federal and state USF programs. 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. USF surcharges are the amounts we collect based on specific items we list on our customers' invoices to fund the FCC's universal service programs. 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.
Our operating revenues for our products and services consisted of the following categories:
 
Three Months Ended September 30,
 
Nine Months Ended September 30,
 
2016
 
2015
 
2016
 
2015
 
(Dollars in millions)
Strategic services
$
674

 
651

 
2,018

 
1,942

Legacy services
796

 
890

 
2,455

 
2,723

Affiliates and other services
756

 
746

 
2,229

 
2,061

Total operating revenues
$
2,226

 
2,287

 
6,702

 
6,726


We do not have any single external customer that provides more than 10% of our total consolidated operating revenues. Substantially all of our consolidated revenues come from customers located in the United States.
We recognize revenues 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 total amount of such surcharges and transaction taxes that we included in revenues aggregated to $37 million for each of the three months ended September 30, 2016 and 2015, and $113 million and $111 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2016 and 2015, respectively. These USF surcharges, where we record revenue, are included in "affiliates and other services" revenues and these transaction taxes are included in "legacy services" revenues. 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.
Our operations are integrated into and reported as part of the consolidated segment data of CenturyLink. CenturyLink's chief operating decision maker ("CODM") is our CODM, but reviews our financial information on an aggregate basis only in connection with our quarterly and annual reports that we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Consequently, we do not provide our discrete financial information to the CODM on a regular basis. As such, we believe we have one reportable segment.