Charter Communications, which is one of Coweta County's largest cable companies, announced plans this week to acquire Helicon Cable Communications.

Helicon serves approximately 171,000 customers in Vermont, Pennsylvania, west Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana. Purchase price for the privately held company is $550 million.

Helicon has been in business for more than 20 years and is headquartered in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Theodore Baum is the chairman, CEO and principal stockholder.

"Helicon has done a good job of technologically supporting its customers," said Jerald Kent, Charter president and CEO. "The company has made substantial investments to upgrade all of their properties and we are pleased that Charter will be gaining these strong systems. We will build upon this platform to bring the wired world to these customers."

Charter, owned by investor Paul Allen, has significant operations in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Louisiana. The addition of customers in those states is consistent with Charter's clustering strategy.

"This is a calculated acquisition process," said Kent. "Our acquisitions over the past few months are part of building Charter strategically and fits into our overall business plans. We continue to build our clusters and gain critical mass to amortize our technology costs over a larger base."

Baum was happy with the transaction.