Damaged Cable Cuts TV, Internet Service

About 2,200 Cox Communications customers in the Centreville area were without telephone, Internet or television service for about six hours on Wednesday due to damage to a main fiber-optic trunk line.

 Mike Leone, Cox director of public affairs for the Northern Virginia region, said the outage was reported in the Fair Lakes area, with much of the lost service reported to homes along the Route 28 corridor where it intersects with Route 29. The outage affected all three of the products that the company offers — cable television, Internet and non-cell telephone service — because the damaged trunk line was a main artery that distributed all of the services to the area.

Customers in thearea reported the outages as early as 10 a.m. and Leone said that repair crews were dispatched immediately to fix the problem. Service was restored to some customers by 4 p.m. with all the customers to be back on line no later than early evening on Wednesday, he said.

The cause of the damage was unknown, Leone said, although it took repair crews a considerable amount of time to fix the trunk line because they had to splice back together bundles of fiber-optic cables. However, it was unknown whether the cable had been cut or the line failed for some other reason, Leone said.