When Suzanne Brackpool asked her telephone company for a high-speed internet connection she imagined that the engineers would solve the problem in a flash. Eleven months later, after a £40,000 operation involving a small army of engineers and three miles of cable, her request was finally granted.

BT engineers undertook 99 separate jobs requiring 50 telegraph poles to furnish Mrs Brackpool’s personal computer in the hamlet of Drymere, near Swaffham, Norfolk, with a broadband conection to the internet.

Mrs Brackpool, 43, who runs an online travel agency, had to endure nearly a year of using an internet connection 100 times slower than she needed while teams of engineers lined the roads between Swaffham and Drymere. Residents put up with road closures while avenues of telegraph poles were erected and men on cherry-picker platforms suspended lines along them.

She assumed that BT had admitted defeat when she heard that the company had logged the 99 jobs.

“It has been horrendous,” she said. “If I knew it would take 11 months then I would have probably found myself a different job. Work has been carried out on so many different dates, and there have been so many different people trying to sort this out, it could have been a Carry On film.”

Online tasks that should have taken her five minutes would take an hour because of the time it took to send and receive data along the old telephone line. She was unable to use broadband because the telephone line from Swaffham, 2¾ miles away, took such a circuitous route that that the signal was too weak. The six-mile cable, whose route weaved around land for “historical or planning reasons”, has now been replaced with a three-mile cable.

“It has been a nightmare connecting through a dial-up modem. I think I have lost a lot of business as a result. I was over the moon when the broadband was connected on Saturday.”

A spokesman for BT said that the cable had taken too long to lay, but said that part of the delay related to obtaining permission to lay a new line. “If the cable has to pass over roads then we have to liaise with the Highways Authority and there are tricky negotiations with the council to make sure that no one is endangered by the work,” he said.

The cable had been laid because it was commercially worthwhile, he said. Although Mrs Brackpool’s home, one of fourteen in her hamlet, would not be the only one to gain broadband access from the new line, the spokesman said he was not sure exactly how many people would benefit.

BT would not disclose the number of engineers involved, but it said that an array of specialist teams had been needed to erect poles and suspend the lines between them. Work began in July and was completed three weeks ago.

Ian Lazenby, the owner of Drymere Lodge Boarding Cattery, who expects to be connected to the line, said: “It is absolutely ridiculous how long it has taken to get this job done. We are only 90 miles from London and just outside the main market town and it takes this long to get broadband.”

Mrs Brackpool said that, in spite of the delay, she was grateful for the chance to improve her business. “We feel quite privileged to have all this work carried out,” she said.