Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CenturyLink's First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tony Davis, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Davis, you may begin.

Thank you, Saeed. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our call today to discuss CenturyLink's first quarter 2016 results released earlier this afternoon. The slide presentation we will be reviewing during the prepared remarks portion of today's call is available in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at ir.centurylink.com. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks today, we will open the call for Q&A. As you move to slide 2, you'll find our Safe Harbor language. We will be making certain forward-looking statements today, particularly as they pertain to guidance for second quarter and full year 2016, as well as other outlooks in our business. We ask that you review our disclosure found on this slide, as well as in our press release and in our SEC filings, which describe factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected by us in our forward-looking statements. As you move to slide 3, we ask that you also note that our earnings release issued earlier this afternoon and the slide presentation and remarks made during this call contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation between these non-GAAP financial measures and the most comparable GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and on our website at ir.centurylink.com. And now as you turn to slide 4, your host for today's call is Glen Post, Chief Executive Officer and President of CenturyLink. Joining Glen today will be Stewart Ewing, CenturyLink's Chief Financial Officer. And also available during the question-and-answer portion of today's call will be Dean Douglas, CenturyLink's President of Sales and Marketing. Our call today will be available for telephone replay through May 12, 2016, and a webcast replay of our call will be available through May 27, 2016. Anyone listening to a taped or a webcast…

Thank you, Glenn. Over the next few minutes, I'll review the financial results for the quarter, provide an overview of second quarter 2016 guidance we included in our earnings release issued earlier this afternoon, and conclude my remarks with a discussion of CenturyLink's liquidity position. Now moving to slide 12, I will review a few highlights from our first quarter results. Please note that I will be reviewing the results, excluding special items, as outlined in our earnings release and associated financial schedules. As Glen mentioned earlier, we achieved solid results for the first quarter, and operating revenues were $4.4 billion on a consolidated basis; a 1.1% decrease from first quarter 2015 operating revenues. The decrease was primarily driven by lower legacy and low bandwidth data services revenue, offsetting an approximate $50 million increase in high-cost support revenues due to CAF Phase 2 higher consumer strategic services and increased high-bandwidth data services revenues. Core revenue, defined as strategic revenue plus legacy revenue, was $3.98 billion for the first quarter; a decrease of 1.9% from a year-ago period. Strategic revenues grew 1.5% year-over-year, primarily driven by strengthened high-speed data revenues, high-speed Internet and Prism TV. In the first quarter, we added approximately 16,900 Prism TV customers, while high-speed Internet customers increased nearly 7,800 during the quarter. We generated operating cash flow of approximately $1.69 billion for the first quarter and achieved an operating cash flow margin of 38.4%. Cash expenses for the first quarter declined $5 million year-over-year, primarily due to lower employee-related costs. Starting in the first quarter of 2016, we've revised our free cash flow calculation to include the cash impact of pension and OPEB cost, as well as stock-based compensation. We believe this calculation provides additional detail and insight into the company's ongoing cash requirements. For first quarter…

Thank you, sir. Our first question comes from Simon Flannery from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay, great. Thanks very much. Good evening. Stewart, I wonder if we could come back to that last comment on the revenue guidance for 2016. You cited pressure on business services revenues and for price increases. Can you just go through that in a little more detail and how that relates to your path to revenue stability? Thanks.

Yeah. So, Simon, if you take our first quarter actual results and the midpoint of second quarter guidance, you'll see that if you – leaving the annual guidance where it is, you'll see that we would require to have revenue growth in the last half of the year to be able to get to the midpoint of guidance. So we think we'll be in the bottom half of guidance based on the things I mentioned. In terms of the business strategic revenues, we've seen some weakness in MPLS revenues, as well as our hosting revenues. We expect to be able to turn that around and grow these revenue streams later in the year. But at this point, based on where we are, we think that we need to give you guidance that – or indicate that will be towards the lower half of the guidance. The other part, I guess, is the price increases. Some of the increases that we were going to put in place, probably in the $40 million range, we've decided at least to defer at this point. We're still talking about them. But we feel it's fair to call that out as a possibility that we'll not implement those increases. Some of our... Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: What products were those on?

They were really across the board, but mostly directed towards high-speed Internet for facility charges and things like – of that nature. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay. And the pressure in business, is that competition or macro or...

I think we're winning. I'm going to let Dean talk about that a little bit. Dean J. Douglas - President-Sales & Marketing: Okay, sure. Some of the pressures that we're facing in the business have to do with a slight adjustment in strategy. For example, in the high-speed Internet realm, what we did was we pivoted from a approach that was pure broadband to one that is more traditional bundled broadband. We did that in the latter part of fiscal year 2015, and so we're starting to work through what that means in the first part of fiscal year 2016. And we expect that that will continue to work through through the middle part of the year, fiscal year 2016. But that pivot to the more traditional approach to high-speed bandwidth in the Consumer segment especially should allow us to have customers that have less proclivity to churn and a higher ARPU. So we think that that's going to be something that we're going to benefit from in the second half of the year and into 2017. On the high-speed – or I'm sorry, the MPLS circuits and the Ethernet circuits for the business marketplace, we actually are doing pretty well with that. In the first quarter it's generally slower than we see in the second quarter and other quarters throughout the year; and we saw that once again in the first quarter of this year. Having said that, we did focus on driving our business and market approach from a enterprise standpoint to really take advantage of opportunities that we think are much nearer term. And so, we're focused on those nearer-term opportunities; and you should start to see those near-term opportunities manifest themselves in the second half of the year. Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'd point out too, Simon, on the business services, the MPLS and Ethernet, we had good – we said 7% growth, we just expected more. We wanted it to be higher than the 7%. So it's growing. It's just we expected to see that level pick up in the latter half of the year. Dean J. Douglas - President-Sales & Marketing: That's absolutely the case. Simon Flannery - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amir Rozwadowski from Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Just following up on Simon's question on sort of the 2016 outlook, does that sort of change the trajectory in terms of your expectation for stabilization in the top line? And then I've got a bit of a follow-up question, if I may.

Yeah. I think we can still get close, if not get there. And the other thing that we're going to do is work on the expense side as well to try to make sure that we keep our operating cash flow more towards the midpoint of the guidance that we've provided.

Thank you. And then on the initiatives around the datacenter assets, you had mentioned we should think about sort of a wrap up around the Q3 or Q4 timeframe, if I'm not mistaken. How should we think about the primary use of cash once that comes in? And at this point, you had mentioned that you've seen a lot of interest. You had mentioned in the past that you'd be open to a sale or a potential JV or other opportunities. Has there been sort of an area that a lot of this interest is focused on? Is it a sale, or how should we think about that? Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'll take the last part, Amir. There has been more focus on the sale from interested parties. There are some who are proposing possible joint ventures. We expect in the next two weeks to have those structures available to us. They are really due next week. And when we have that, we'll know more about not only the structures and the partnership opportunities versus a sale, but also the level of interest in terms of valuation.

In terms of the use of proceeds, we're going to wait until we get closer to understanding what that might be. But basically one option is to – if we do dispose of the properties and the business, our EBITDA will be reducing; and we want to try to keep our debt to EBITDA ratio at about 3 times. So we may repay a certain amount of the debt that we have outstanding over a period of time. The other opportunity that we'll look at is to look at – to the extent that business is generating free cash flow, to potentially look at a share buyback to mitigate the negative impact of any free cash flow per share that would be associated with the disposal of that business. And then we'll look at investing in our business as well, potentially the network to try to drive our speeds faster and drive more customers to the network.

Thank you very much for the additional color.

Thank you. And our next question comes from David Barden from Bank of America.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess, first, just a short-term kind of picture. Stewart, if I go line by line through the strategic services, legacy services data integration quarter-over-quarter, the businesses that are declining went down $88 million; and the businesses that grew, grew $14 million for a negative $74 million sequential. And the guidance range suggests that that goes from minus $74 million to a range of minus $20 million to plus $30 million, so that like a plus $100 million swing is in the realm of possibility. If you could kind of walk us through kind of these line items and tell us where all these big changes are conceivably coming from, I think it would give people a little bit more conviction about what's supposed to happen next quarter. And then longer term, obviously one of the big questions a lot of people have is couple of years ago you guys were looking into the future, saw mid-80% types of payout ratios in your future as a full cash taxpayer and you decided to cut the dividend. And people are doing the math now. They're looking into the future. They're seeing bonus tax depreciation reverse and payouts going at least into the mid-70%s, and there's fears that you guys are going to go back and cut the dividend again because that's what you did last time. Could you kind of talk about that issue as well? Thanks. Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: David, let me – Stewart is pulling the line item information, and I'll just talk about the dividend issue. Dividend is a key part of the value proposition that we have for shareholders. And there's no guarantee, but I know our board and management team feels like we're very much committed to the dividend. And we think with additional approval of bonus depreciation, you look at our – even though the payout ratios are going up, we believe we're going to certainly have adequate free cash flow to continue the dividend. So I can tell you, our board has not discussed reducing the dividend. I think it'd never happen. But we're committed to our dividend; again, a primary factor in our value proposition to shareholders, so we're committed to that dividend.

Yeah. And the other thing that we've said as well, David, on the dividend is that versus where we were a few years ago when we reduced the dividend, as long as we can see a path to EBITDA stability and EBITDA growth down the road, it's okay for our dividend payout ratio to float up higher than we talked about before. In terms of the increase in the strategic services and what that implies, basically a fair amount of that is due to rate increases that we've put in and expect to put in in the second quarter of the year. So that's driving quite a bit of it. The rest of it is due to unit increases that we expect to see in our IPTV products, as well as our high-speed Internet products.

Did we lose you, Stewart?

Yeah. No, in general, that's pretty much it. I can't really go line by line. But just in general, it's basically price increases on those products, predominantly high-speed Internet.

And so, your comments earlier about not putting through some price increases, there are in fact some other price increases that are going in?

Yes. There are other price increases. Of the total amount that we expected to do and that we kind of baked into our guidance that we gave for the full year at the end of the fourth quarter, we chose to not do about $40 million of the total amount. But there are other price increases that are going in and have gone in sometime during the first quarter, as well as we expect to put in throughout really the second quarter, the third quarter, that will drive some of the revenues in the back half of the year. Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: David, and just a little more color on the revenue. We've got the rapidly expanding GPON markets. We've gone up again. Now we're up at 1.5 million homes and businesses we're passing. With the exclusion of the last couple of hundred thousand, I know we were at 21% penetration at the end of March. And we just started with the last year with that GPON work, so we believe there's significant upside going forward with those GPON markets, as well as the new Prism markets, we entered just late last year a number of those markets. So that along with the MVU and MTU focus we have now, we've got fiber to a number of MVUs, MTUs that are going to help drive revenues. So we think there's really upside here in the last half of the year to drive greater penetration, as Stewart said, additional revenue there.

Yeah. And we think our MPLS revenues will grow in the back half of the year based on the installations that we can do of customers that we have sold and expect to sell, as well as our IT services business is small, but it's growing and contributing to expected revenue growth in the back half the year as well.

All right, great. Thanks for the color, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Niknam from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Just two, if I could. First, on consumer broadband. So revenues were effectively flat sequentially. Can you just give us some more color on what's driving that slower growth? And then just bigger picture on your asset mix, if you think about the business over the long-term, are there areas you think you may need greater scale to begin competing more effectively? Then conversely, are there other opportunities like the colo business where you may not necessarily need ownership or where you'd look to maybe move away from over time? Thanks. Dean J. Douglas - President-Sales & Marketing: So let me take the first part of the question, which is with regard to the consumer broadband business. As I mentioned earlier, in the second half of last year, we actually pivoted from a model where we focused on pure broadband to move to a more traditional broadband mix. And so, as we do that, we've moved the marketing funds from focus on pure broadband to taking on the more traditional broadband or bundled broadband kinds of services. And so, we expect that business to recover, as I mentioned, in the second half of the year, because we'll still see some marketing spend and investment in marketing that we need to do to drive that broadband business. So we're seeing it flat sequentially, but we don't think that the business is going to be flat sequentially based upon where we're focused and the drive we have. And, as I mentioned and I'll reiterate, it does drive a churn model that's significantly lower than the churn model that we would see in the pure broadband. So not only would we get new customers going forward with the marketing efforts we have in place to…

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Frank Louthan from Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Great. Thank you. Can you comment on special access, what's sort of your net exposure there and thoughts on some of the action that the FCC is taking? And then you mentioned in the prepared remarks about better investments in your network versus where the data center opportunity is there. Where do you see the highest returns in investing your network and where are you going to be placing your CapEx over the next 12 months?

Yeah. Frank, so this week the FCC concluded its special access tariff investigation, and really that will have a minimal financial impact and, in fact, tariff impacts to us as well. And, of course, they opened a special access notice to a full (36:02) rulesmaking that could potentially impose more regulations, special access pricing terms and conditions. It appears that the FCC is seeking to impose additional price regulation on the industry, as well as redefining what constitutes a competitive market between the market participants. The most concerning financial issue in the proceeding, as we appreciate it at this point, is the potential imposition of a productivity factor or an X factor that could require CenturyLink to lower its special access rates on an annual basis. We believe the market for high-bandwidth data services is highly competitive, as evidenced by the fact that we're not getting all the special access, it's going away and converting to Ethernet. The cable companies get some, the fiber companies get some, CLECs gets some. So there's plenty of competition. And we don't believe that heavy handed regulation, including an arbitrary market and bandwidth definitions, as well as unwarranted price regulation, we think that that will only serve to just hinder further investment in broadband, especially in rural areas where it's tough to make the investment work anyway. So we don't know what the outcome will be at this point and really haven't been able to quantify the financial impacts because, again, we really don't know where they're going to end up from the standpoint of having a productivity factor or X factor or not. Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Can you tell us what sort of your net exposure is between special access revenue versus any cost you have for network – for access?

I mean, it's the wholesale revenue basically and it's high margin, Frank. So there aren't a lot of continued incremental expenses associated with providing that service. It's mostly in the investment that was required to build the service out. There's some maintenance cost, but it's probably pretty minimal. Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Well, there's also costs you have, say, in outside of your region where you're buying special access is what I was getting to.

That's true. And that would... Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: You would benefit on the cost side as well.

That would be a benefit on the cost side, as well, Frank. And we haven't really been able to quantify that either. And frankly, I'm not sure exactly the relationship now between what we spend with our third parties versus our revenue. I think when we looked at this in years past, basically there was some benefit, but the benefit wasn't enough to offset the potential reduction; and especially this time when they may bifurcate the special access between urban areas and rural areas. So you really just don't know what they'll end up doing there and what the implications would be to us until we really get a better understanding and get more detail and have the notice of proposed rulesmaking and reply comments made and all. I think then we'll have a better feel, maybe towards the end of the third quarter or so. Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Got it. Okay. And on the network investment focus?

Yeah. In terms of our network, I mean, we believe our best returns come from where we're increasing the speed availability in the network that allows us to be more competitive with the cable companies and others that provide high-bandwidth data services and Internet services. So that's where our best opportunity is, I believe. And we'll continue to really do the things that we need to do to improve our network and improve the speeds that our customers are able to take advantage of on our network. We have quite a bit of work going on really starting a year or so ago, really spearheaded by Aamir Hussain, our CTO, in terms of really increasing the – and really utilizing and getting more life out of the old copper network. So we realize fiber is the way to go and is a good way to go when you can afford it from a density standpoint. But we believe there's a lot of life left in the copper network and a lot of things we can do with bonding and vectoring and other technologies that are coming down the pipe that will help us be able to stay competitive and enhance the experience that our customers receive. Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: And just to give you an example of that, Frank. If you look at just where we have a GPON investment in the last year or so, we've got 20% penetration already in those GPON markets that have been there for several months. So it's really encouraging. And also, where we got the vectoring, now we're seeing great take rates there. So we really have, especially in the – well, it's really both, but especially in the business side, we have very little market share from a data revenue standpoint in our legacy markets. And as we roll out the GPON capabilities as well as the vectoring type capabilities in these large and mid-sized markets, we're seeing really good success. And that's why we believe in the second half of the year we're going to see better growth than we've seen in a while in MPLS, the Ethernet type services. Frank Garreth Louthan - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tim Horan from Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Timothy Horan - Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. (Broker): Thanks, guys. Just three quick ones. Can you give some examples of what you mean by more advanced broadband services or more bundled broadband services? Also, how does your ARPU – maybe you can talk about your broadband average ARPU and maybe how does that compare to your competitors? And then third, can you just give us a sense of how deep the fiber is in the network at this point? It seems like vectoring and a bunch of these other technologies, you've got to get down to a couple of thousand feet. And I know you talked about 1.5 million homes passed with GPON, and maybe where are you in terms of dollar amounts of fiber deployment a year or some other metric to give us a sense of where we can get to a point where the broadband speeds are really more comparable to the cable companies? Thanks. Dean J. Douglas - President-Sales & Marketing: All right. So let's talk about the examples of what we mean by bundled broadband services. So the traditional high-speed Internet services are really what you'd expect in the double play or triple play. So it's not only high-speed, but it's also video and some voice technology as well. And so that's pretty much a typical broadband suite of services. When you look at the Prism adds that we did in the first quarter of this year, 53% of them were with new customers. So you're now starting to see services like Prism attract new customers that were not customers of CenturyLink; and they're dragging along broadband services with that video play. So 98% of those customers…

Thank you. And our final question comes from Phil Cusick from JPMorgan. Your line's open. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. It's Forrest in for Phil. As you see more over the top video offers coming, does it make sense to stand up your own full video platform in new markets rather than just bundling a DTV/OTV (46:55) product, for example, with the great broadband speed offering? How do you think about that? Dean J. Douglas - President-Sales & Marketing: So we think it's a very, very interesting proposition. And so, we're piloting that capability in four markets, and we're going to evaluate how that plays out in those markets. But we think it's a very, very intriguing opportunity; and we're definitely looking at that as an alternative to some of the other opportunities we have in the video space.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the conference back over for closing remarks. Mr. Glen Post? Glen F. Post - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Saeed. We're confident that CenturyLink is well-positioned to help our customers realize the promise of the digital economy, as we've stated as our goal. We have a strong set of assets. We have dedicated and passionate employees. We got the financial strength to continue to invest in our future. And we have the strategic clarity of how we will grow our business by connecting our customers to the digital world. And we're really inspired by the opportunities we see for our customers, for our employees and our shareholders in the months and years ahead. So thank you for joining our call today, and we look forward to speaking with you in the weeks ahead.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's event. This concludes our program. You may all disconnect, and have a wonderful day.