Halyard Capital and John Brooks, a cable vet late of Broadstripe, have teamed up to purchase the cable assets of Newnan Utilities for $70 million and formed a new company called NuLink. (See Halyard Forms NuLink.)

The acquisition gives NuLink a cable foothold in Coweta County, Ga., a region roughly 40 miles southwest of Atlanta that's considered to have high growth prospects. Municipally owned Newnan Utilities launched cable and high-speed Internet services there in 1997, competing against Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) and Charter Communications Inc. .

NuLink says it plans to ramp up marketing in Coweta County and launch a range of new products, including digital telephony and video on demand (VOD).

The system in Coweta County uses the Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) digital video platform. The system's Acceleron high-speed data service tops out at 9 Mbit/s.

NuLink plans to grow via acquisitions in the region, but did not say when it expects to swing more deals.

Brooks, who's serving as NuLink's chairman and CEO, most recently was an executive vice president for Broadstripe (formerly Millennium Digital Media), an MSO headquartered in St. Louis. He started his career at Cencom Cable Associates.

Halyard Capital, a New York-based private equity firm with $600 million of capital under management, noted it had been seeking to buy into a "fully upgraded cable system in a high growth market," and that it plans to pump more money into NuLink's infrastructure.

― Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Cable Digital News