Lives were put at risk after a large swathe of rural Perthshire was left without mobile phone coverage for more than a week, it has been claimed.
Residents in the Kenmore and Fortingall areas, many of whom are customers of Vodafone or O2, were unable to make or receive calls for more than a week.
Crucially the area’s 14-strong first responder team all use one or other of the two affected networks and feared the issue would delay them from getting to seriously ill patients.
The volunteers say it can take up to an hour for an ambulance to reach the area in an emergency, meaning they have a key role to play in keeping people alive by going to their aid in the critical first minutes.
While the issue was finally fixed on Thursday, the group say such long-term outages could be fatal.
Kaye Dott, who co-ordinates the first responders in the Loch Tay area, said: “Because there is no ambulance based in Aberfeldy now it takes longer for one to arrive – it can be up to an hour.
“We are the first call for someone in cardiac arrest or having a heart attack.”
First responder Harriet Gray added: “There is a small window of things we are called to, but those are really time-critical. They are cases where we could really make a difference if an ambulance is a long time away.
“A lot of places we are called to are rural and we can help the ambulance crews with local knowledge to get them to the scene.
“It’s potentially putting lives at risk. We had no phone signal all last week and a lot of us don’t have a landline. Even if we did have landline, once we were at a call-out we wouldn’t be able to call the ambulance service for advice or to update them.”
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Ambulance Service said it was planning to introduce new measures for notifying first responders, including the expansion of the Airwave communications network used by the emergency services.
She said: “We have multiple contact details for our first responders, including landlines and mobile numbers which are on different networks and have well established contingencies in place.
“We will be further enhancing these arrangements by rolling out Airwave to first responders this year.”
A spokeswoman for Vodafone, which has a network sharing agreement with O2, said it was taking steps to fix the issue.
She said: “We were having difficulty in obtaining permission from the landowner to access the site in order to fix a technical issue.”
A spokeswoman for O2 said: “Our engineers visited the site last night and again this morning and the service has now been restored.”
