A COMMUNICATIONS company has pledged to connect a ‘forgotten’ estate in north Durham to a superfast internet service.

Only a handful of houses on the The Links estate, near Shotley Bridge, can access fibre broadband, which has proved frustrating for online businesses in the area.

Steve Yates runs an internet hosting firm from his home on Muirfield Close and said he is unable to work effectively without the high speed connection.

He said: “The kind of customers I have need the extra bandwidth because I do camera monitoring and security. When you host a website you have got international traffic coming in and you need the bandwidth. I have been telling people that I can do certain things and have the infrastructure to do so but there is no business with this connection.”

The problem has been traced to Cabinet 49 on Queens Road.

Durham County Councillor Owen Temple, who said the estate seemed to have been forgotten about has written to BT asking them to rectify the problem.

The firm said it will not be done until late next year.

A spokesman for BT said: “We are sorry for the delay in upgrading this cabinet to fibre broadband.

“Work is now scheduled to begin in the latter part of 2016 as part of next years planned engineering schedule.”

“As with all civil engineering projects of this size there are sometimes unforeseen delays which we do our best to overcome.”