Village comms cut-off ‘danger’
No access to 999 calls
speeds which is some compensation for Crianlarich being omitted from the superfast broadband rollout this year.”
Mr Lockhart added: “The situation is now very severe, with constant outages causing significant disruption to the lives of the residents.
“The fact that the village can be without access to 999 for up to an hour is frankly dangerous and could have disastrous consequences.
“To their credit the residents of Crianlarich have been very patient under the circumstances but enough is enough.
“It’s time for BT to accept their responsibilities and urgently fix the exchange.”
The communications firm this week offered a fresh apology over the outages. A BT spokesperson said: “We’re very sorry for the interruptions to services in the Crianlarich area recently. There is no issue with overheating in the exchange, we use cooling equipment across all of our exchanges. Specialist senior engineers continue to monitor the exchange both remotely and by basing themselves in the exchange.
“Engineers have replaced all hardware possible and the exchange is now stable. Calls in the area made by mobile phones to 999 are not affected by any of the recent outages.
“We take the matter of any exchange outage very seriously and as well as working to stabilise the current hardware we will be upgrading broadband equipment in early 2019 which will bring faster speeds and greater reliability. Broadband services will be automatically migrated to the faster speeds as soon as the migration is complete.”
Stirling MSP Bruce Crawford has also taken up the villagers complaints. Earlier this month, he called for BT to take urgent action to restore a reliable phone service for landline users to the Crianlarich area as soon as possible.
Mr Crawford said: “This simply isn’t good enough and residents are right to be frustrated. Customers loyally pay for their line rental and expect to receive a working service in return. On many occasions, this simply isn’t happening.
“I have written to BT and hope to see a solution as soon as possible.”