Blenheim Rural Fire Brigade officer Callun Mitchell says pagers are the best way to alert rural fire volunteers.

Rural firefighters with poor cellphone coverage are worried they will be late getting to major bush fires if their pager alerts are scrapped in favour of text messages.

The New Zealand Fire Service has put the pager network up for tender after Spark announced the network would close in 2017.

It is considering replacing the paging alert system with text messaging if the tender bid is unsuccessful, but this has some firefighters worried about poor cellphone reception.

Okiwi Bay Rural Fire Force chief fire officer Ian Montgomery - who has battled several large forest fires this summer - said emergency services in his remote patch of the Marlborough Sounds relied heavily on pagers because there was no cellphone reception.

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The fires were fast moving and time-critical, Montgomery said.

"The quicker we can get there, the smaller they will be. In the past we've had fires that got near the road, and if we hadn't got our heads up very quickly from the pagers, the fire would have been too big to control by the time we got there."

There were several rural brigades in the South Island that worked in areas without cellphone reception, he said.

"Down the West Coast there are huge areas with no cellphone reception. There's lots of gaps. Around the Sounds there are big chunks that have got no reception. Pagers always work."

New Zealand Fire Service director of information and communication technology Murray Mitchell said there were 3500 rural volunteers across the country to consider when reviewing the pager network.

"We've got to make sure volunteers get appropriate notice of turn out. There's a whole range of options, sirens, texting, private paging, a range of things," Mitchell said.

Marlborough Kaikoura Rural Fire Authority principal fire officer Richard McNamara said moving to text alerts could mean having to improve the cellphone coverage in remote areas.

However, pagers were still viable and McNamara expected the tender process to be successful, he said.

"It's not just emergency services that use it. There are systems in the corporate world and hospitals that rely on paging. The market is there, it's just finding the right financial model."

There were disadvantages to pagers though, he said.

"It's one shot. If you happen to be in an area with no coverage, you're not going to get it. With a phone, if you're out of range and you come back in, you'll still get the message."

Mitchell said several companies had expressed an interest in taking over the network but would not confirm who they were.

A condition of the tender was that the network used the same pagers already being used by the Fire Service, he said.

The 111 call-centre would not be affected by a new network supplier because it operated independently, he said.

Tender proposals close on March 18.

Spark declined to comment.