VILLAGERS are demanding urgent action to ensure their Internet speed is increased as complaints grow.

Residents and businesses in and around Yearby, east Cleveland, are calling on their local council to try and force BT Openreach to speed up installation of essential network upgrades.

The move comes after they suffered more than ten days of slow connection speeds which resulted in people struggling to carry out basic online tasks like opening and writing emails.

Resident Peter Sotheran said he had experienced problems with speeds dropping by half during busy periods of the day.

He said: “This is too slow to achieve anything, other basic emails. It’s slower than the dial-up modems we used a decade ago,” he said local resident Peter Sotheran. “An attempt to visit the web site of Redcar & Cleveland Council took 13 minutes to load the council’s home page. It took me more than one and a quarter hours to upload a simple file recently. Eventually I had to wait until the network had quietened down in the early hours of the morning.”

The village is almost three miles from the Redcar telephone exchange which places it on the outer fringe of the area served by the old copper wire phone network.

The main super-fast fibre loop linking Redcar and Guisborough, runs down Yearby Bank, passing within 25 yards of the entrance to the village, according to campaigners.

Mr Sotheran added: “For the 50-60 homes and half a dozen business in Yearby it is now proving impossible to do anything other than send and receive basic emails. Services that others take for granted, such as catch-up TV, streaming videos and sport, even watching video clips on YouTube are not available. “The digital world comes to a grinding halt at the entrance to the village.”

Cllr Dale Quigley, the council’s cabinet member for economic growth, said: “For many residents across Redcar and Cleveland broadband is an essential component of everyday life – be it for employment, education or entertainment.

“So we can appreciate the frustration of those residents in Yearby and other parts of the Borough who are still experiencing slow internet speeds. Because of this, the council is working closely with Digital Durham and BT to ensure that 97 percent of the borough will have access to faster broadband by the end of 2019.”

A BT spokeswoman confirmed they were already working with the council. She said: “Nearly 8,000 homes and businesses in the Guisborough area can already access fibre broadband speeds. Further upgrades are planned in both Guisborough and the village of Yearby.”