Charter Communications has labelled the June 15 attack on its network infrastructure as an "act of domestic terrorism."

The vandalism caused an outage for Spectrum Mobile customers in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys last month.

Providing an update on the attack this week, Charter Communications reported that 13 fiber cables were severed, including more than 2,600 individual fibers.

This impacted a range of customers, including redundancy to emergency services, including a US military base, emergency dispatch and 911 communication services, local fire and police departments, 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,” said Chris Winfrey, president and CEO, Charter Communications. “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. 

“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.”  

At the time of the attack, Spectrum said that fiber optic lines were cut in multiple places in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. 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 Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly also called for tougher punishments for people who steal or attack telecom infrastructure.

One of the biggest factors for vandalism against telecom infrastructure is the value of materials such as copper. DCD has covered several stories in the last year alone relating to copper theft.

One such example of this happened last year when suspected copper thieves toppled a 488-foot rod cell tower in Oklahoma, causing an estimated $500,000 in damage.