This investigation optimizes numerically a viscous-friction damper connected to a cable close to one cable anchor for fastest reduction of the total mechanical cable energy during a free vibration decay test. The optimization parameters are the viscous coefficient of the viscous part and the ratio between the friction force and displacement amplitude of the friction part of the transverse damper. Results demonstrate that an almost pure friction damper with negligibly small viscous damping generates fastest cable energy reduction over the entire decay. The ratio between the friction force and displacement amplitude of the optimal friction damper differs from that derived from the energy equivalent optimal viscous damper. The reason for this is that the nonlinearity of the friction damper causes energy spillover from the excited to higher modes of the order of 10%, i.e.cables with attached friction dampers vibrate at several frequencies. This explains why the energy equivalent approach does not yield the optimal friction damper. Analysis of the simulation data demonstrates that the optimally tuned friction damper dissipates the same energy per cycle as if each modal component of the cable were damped by its corresponding optimal linear viscous damper.