RESIDENTS who had their internet cut at the start of April have claimed they were strung along for weeks by promises of restoration.

Approximately 20 homes had been without internet around the Rawlyn Road area in Doffcocker since the beginning of the month.

The impact has led to stressful and financial implications as residents worked to overcome the restrictive barrier.

And they have claimed that they were initially promised it would be dealt with within three days - and then three weeks - before finally being scheduled for restoration last night.

Natalie Gregson, who works for Macmillan Cancer Support, said the outage had “massively affected” her day-to-day work.

She said: “I have not been able to work from home and find somewhere else to work while my husband has had to take time off as he couldn’t work without internet.

“We had an elderly neighbour rushed into hospital because of Covid and her husband wasn’t able to keep in touch with her through Facetime and Skype.

“They have been horrible and the customer service has just been diabolical. We were told three days and then three weeks and then it just carried on. We have had basically no contact from Openreach and we have not been able to contact them.”

Openreach, a division of telecommunications company BT, maintains the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone network.

The telegraph pole was originally removed for health and safety reasons, with engineers claiming that it was rotting from the inside and causing a risk.

A spokeswoman for Openreach said: “We’re very sorry for this loss of service which was caused by a damaged telegraph pole and overhead cabling.

“Engineers made the area safe but work to replace the pole and cabling did not go ahead as planned. We hope to have all services restored by the end of the day.”

Another resident, Angela Whitehead, said the saga had been a nightmare, but she was happy things were seemingly being sorted.

She said: “It's been a struggle and not being able to get through to them has been difficult. But seeing a new pole going up was promising."