QWEST CORP

We are a networking company with the goal of connecting people, data, and applications quickly, securely and effortlessly. We are unleashing the world's digital potential by providing a broad array of integrated products and services to our domestic and global Business customers and our domestic Mass Markets customers. Our specific products and services are detailed in Note 3—Revenue Recognition and below under the heading "Operations - Products and Services" in Item 1 of Part I of this report.

Our ultimate parent company, Lumen Technologies, Inc., has cash management arrangements or loan arrangements with a majority of its subsidiaries that include lines of credit, affiliate obligations, capital contributions and dividends. As part of these cash management or loan arrangements, affiliates provide lines of credit to certain other affiliates. Amounts outstanding under these lines of credit and intercompany obligations vary from time to time. Under these arrangements, the majority of our cash balance is advanced on a daily basis for centralized management by Lumen's service company affiliate. From time to time we may declare and pay dividends to Qwest Services Corporation ("QSC"), our direct parent, using cash owed to us under these advances, which has the net effect of reducing the amount of these advances. We report the balance of these transfers on our consolidated balance sheet as advances to affiliates.

At December 31, 2024, we served approximately 1.6 million broadband subscribers. Our methodology for counting broadband subscribers may be different than the methodologies used by other companies.

For the reasons noted in Note 1—Background and Summary of Significant Accounting Policies we have determined that we have one reportable segment.

Products, Services and Revenue

We reported our revenue derived from our operations serving our Mass Markets customers, primarily within the first three categories listed below, and our revenue derived from our operations servicing our Business customers, primarily in the 'Harvest', 'Nurture' and 'Grow' categories listed below:

•Voice and Other, under which we derive revenues from (i) providing local and long-distance services, professional services, and other ancillary services, (ii) federal broadband and state support payments, and (iii) equipment, IT solutions and other services;

•Harvest, which includes our legacy services managed for cash flow, including Time Division Multiplexing voice and private line services;

•Nurture, which includes our more mature offerings, including primarily ethernet;

•Grow, which includes existing and emerging products and services in which we are significantly investing, including our dark fiber and wavelengths services; and

•Affiliate Services, which are (i) communications services that we provide to our affiliates and also provide to external customers and (ii) application development and support services that we provide to our affiliates, as described further in Note 14—Affiliate Transactions.

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

Macroeconomic Changes

Over the past few years, macroeconomic changes have impacted us and our customers in several ways.

We believe macroeconomic changes over the past few years have resulted in (i) increases in certain revenue streams and decreases in others, (ii) operational challenges resulting from inflation and shortages of certain components and other supplies that we use in our business, (iii) delays in our cost transformation initiatives and (iv) delayed decision-making by certain of our customers. None of these effects, individually or in the aggregate, have to date materially impacted our financial performance or financial position.

Industry developments over the past few years have increased fiber construction demand from customers. The resulting increase in construction labor rates increased the cost of enabling units to be capable of receiving our Quantum Fiber broadband services. We believe these factors also occasionally contributed to a delay in attaining our Quantum Fiber buildout targets.

Continued business uncertainty, supply constraints or inflationary pressures could materially impact our financial results in a variety of ways, including by increasing our expenses, decreasing our revenues, further delaying our network expansion plans or otherwise interfering with our ability to deliver products and services.

Trends Impacting Our Operations

In addition to the above-described impact of macroeconomic and industry pressures, our consolidated operations have been, and will continue to be, impacted by the following trends:

•Customers' demand for automated products and services and competitive pressures will require that we continue to invest in new technologies and automated processes to improve our customers' experience and reduce our operating expenses.

•The increased use of digital applications, video streaming, gaming, robotics, quantum computing and artificial intelligence has substantially increased demand for robust, scalable network services. We are continuing to enhance our product and service offerings and taking other steps to enable customers to have access to greater bandwidth and capacity.

•Businesses continue to adopt distributed, global operating models. We are expanding and enhancing our fiber network, connecting more buildings to our network to generate revenue opportunities and reducing our reliance upon other carriers.

•Changes in customer preferences and in the regulatory, technological and competitive environment are (i) significantly reducing demand for our more mature service offerings, commoditizing certain offerings, or resulting in volume or rate reductions for other offerings and (ii) also creating certain opportunities for us arising out of increased demand for advanced networking services and high-speed, low-latency secure data transmissions.

•The operating margins of several of our newer, more technologically advanced services, some of which may connect to customers through other carriers, are lower than the operating margins on our traditional, on-net wireline services.

•Uncertainties regarding our financial performance and overall leverage of us and our affiliates have caused, and may continue to cause, certain customers and other third parties to avoid transacting business with us.

•Declines in our traditional wireline services and other more mature offerings have necessitated right-sizing our cost structure to remain competitive.

These and other developments and trends impacting our operations are discussed elsewhere in Item 1A and this Item 7.