An 18th Century building containing two businesses was destroyed in Sudbury on Sunday, with one woman rescued from an upstairs flat.
Suffolk Fire Service was investigating why all on-call fire fighters at Sudbury station were not alerted.
The Sudbury engine arrived two minutes later than the Long Melford crew, which was three miles further away.
The fire service said the control room was called at 18:17 BST and the first engine, also crewed by on-call retained fire fighters, arrived from Long Melford at 18:32 BST.
The engine from Sudbury, which was based about 300 yards from the fire on Market Hill, arrived at 18:34 BST.
The 15-minute response time missed the target of 11 minutes.
Mark Hardingham, Suffolk's chief fire officer, said paging equipment was usually "pretty reliable and effective".
"There are a number of factors that affect the way the equipment operates, so we need to look at each one of those before we can make any firm conclusions," he said.
"Initial tests reveal the hardware and the way the system operates was OK, but we're now working with Ofcom and Arqiva to check the radio signal in the Sudbury area."
Suffolk County Council is considering making Â£1m cuts to the fire service's Â£22m annual budget by 2016/17. Fire stations outside of Ipswich, Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds are only staffed by retained crews following previous cuts.
Andy Vingoe, Suffolk chairman of the Fire Brigades Union, said: "The whole thing just goes to show the under-investment we have in the fire service at the moment.
"This fire shows they got there just in time that night - next time we don't know if we're going to be so lucky."
Earlier today a hamster was recovered alive from a burnt out flat to the rear of the Market Hill building.

Charles Howden, 64 and Fiona Stanley, 59 both from Newtongrange were killed when their Triumph Bonneville motorcycle collided with a white BMW car.
The accident happened on the A6094 at Rosewell at about 22:40 on Thursday.
In a statement, their families said they were "much loved by all those whose lives they touched".
They added: "Their kindness to others was legendary. They will long be remembered for the laughter they brought into our lives and the love they had for their friends, for their family and most of all the love they had for each other."
Officers are carrying out inquiries into the full circumstances surrounding the collision and have urged anyone with information to contact them.

On sale at Foston's Fine Meats in Duns are scotch eggs - with a chocolate twist.
For butcher Greg Foston has replaced the traditional hens' eggs with Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
He has wrapped the Easter treats with sweet chilli pork meat which, he claims, compliments the chocolate "perfectly".
It is the latest in a series of peculiar products created by Mr Foston.
He said a cracked black pepper and strawberry sausage produced to mark Wimbledon was a great success.
"We are always discussing new flavours and combinations and wanted to come up with some way of combining chocolate eggs into one of our products," he said.
"We did some experimenting with a plain pork sausage meat with the Creme Egg in the middle which we found was very tasty but needed something else.
"So we decided upon sweet chilli pork sausage meat around the egg and found it complimented the chocolate perfectly.
"The eggs are best eaten warmed up so the egg is melted in the middle."
He estimated that they contain about 300 calories.
Mr Foston added: "We are also concocting a pork sausage with whole Cadburys mini eggs actually inside the sausage."
Only three of eight pagers for retained fire fighters went off when they were needed to tackle a blaze in Suffolk.
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