An angry meeting last night (Monday 21 November) reportedly heard numerous people speak of their fears for the Uig community, after weeks without a 4G signal from telecoms provider EE.

Na h-Eileanan an Iar MSP Alasdair Allan, who listened to local concerns, said the problem had now been going on for well over a month.

And local people fear that the lack of connectivity is breaking down the function of essential services, including doctors, school and emergency response teams, risking more depopulation as life becomes untenable in the area.

EE say their engineers are now on site, but residents and businesses in the Uig district say that comes after more than a month when school, home and community life have all been severely affected by a lack of internet and mobile phone access in the area.

The issue has been compounded for local people by the unreliability of information from EE, whose own service status website currently shows no service problems in the district.

And as we reported earlier this month (https://www.welovestornoway.com/index.php/articles-auto-3/26253-uig-in-plea-for-help-over-mobile-service) it’s not the first time Uig has been hit by this type of outage, with weeks at a time of zero signal over recent years.

Dr Allan said today: “While EE been attending the mast sites to attempt repairs on a number of occasions in recent weeks, the length of time this is taking to resolve (as well as the clear lack of resilience in EE's infrastructure in the area) is completely unacceptable.

“People cannot work, businesses cannot function and essential services cannot operate.”