Bullet knocks out Charter cable TV, Internet, phone service

GAINESVILLE - It was a well-placed bullet that knocked out Charter Communications entire cable TV, Internet and phone system in Hall County overnight Wednesday.

Regional spokesman Skip James said Thursday that the outage was initially detected by Charter’s monitoring system at 12:30 a.m., indicating that all services were affected in Gainesville.

"Charter’s area Emergency Response Team was notified immediately," James said, "and (began trying to pinpoint the problem) which required physically inspecting up to 30 miles of fiber optic cable."

He said the workers traced the damage to a gunshot to the fiber optic cable on Mountain View Road between Oakwood and Gainesville.

"Seven spans of cable had to be taken down between the power poles" in order to make the necessary repairs, James added.

"Video service (cable television) was restored at 6 a.m., with all services back on at 7:15 a.m.," he said. "Due to the sheer volume of modems for Internet service re-acquiring connections, it may have taken some a longer time to go back online."

He said all cables were reinstalled and the repair work was finished by 8:15 a.m. Thursday.

James said this was the first serious incident requiring full activation of the area Emergency Response Team since its inception in early 2006 after Charter’s new management team arrived in 2005. "The response team did an outstanding job of efficiently isolating the issue, preparing the cables for and performing the repair to restore the valuable services to our subscribers within the shortest time possible," he said.

James said the incident will be reported to police.