Charter Communications (NASDAQ: CHTR) has more to say about the June 15 attack on its network infrastructure that company President/CEO Chris Winfrey called an “act of domestic terrorism.”
The company now says 13 fiber cables were severed, including more than 2,600 individual fibers. The vandalism caused an outage for Spectrum Mobile customers in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys last month, according to Datacenter Digest.
Winfrey said this outage impacted a range of customers, including redundancy to emergency services, a U.S. military base, emergency dispatch and 911 communication services and local fire and police departments. The outage also affected financial institutions, court buildings, healthcare facilities and hospitals, educational institutions, plus cell towers providing mobile services.
Charter said that more than 50,000 residential customers and more than 500 business customers were affected for up to 30 hours.
“These criminal attacks on our country’s vital communications networks are intentional and cause outages that put lives at risk,” Winfrey said last week. “This is a pervasive and persistent threat to American families and businesses across the country that cannot be tolerated, and such life-threatening events should be declared acts of domestic terrorism and prosecuted accordingly.”
He explained, “This requires immediate attention from federal and state legislation classifying these attacks as a felony, dedicated engagement from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, and swift, aggressive prosecution of those criminals causing the perilous situation that results from these outages.”
The local FBI office told KESQ -TV it was investigating but “no suspect has been identified at this time,” according to Policyband.
At the time of the attack, Spectrum said that fiber optic lines were cut in multiple places in Van Nuys. Vandals may have attempted to steal copper instead to sell for cash, as is a common issue for network operators around the globe.
Earlier this year, former FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly also called for harsher punishments for those who steal or attack telecom infrastructure, Inside Towers reported.
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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