What this is
There are plenty of "digital detox" lists out there. Nearly all of them take the owner's word for it, because checking is slow and marketing copy is free. So a lodge with Starlink in every cabin ends up on the same list as a meditation centre that physically takes your phone, described in the same words.
This guide tells them apart. It grades every place on one question — can you get online if you want to? — and publishes the answer even when it's unflattering, including for places that are otherwise excellent.
Where the information comes from
Every entry starts with the owner's own website, which we link from the listing and the entry page. If they publish their connectivity details, we go with those and mark the entry Operator-stated. If they don't, we fall back on booking sites, tourism board listings and what guests keep saying in reviews, and mark it From listings or Thin evidence instead.
We read guest reviews and summarise them. We never quote, copy or scrape them, and we never name a reviewer.
Canada and the United States
The survey began as a Canadian list and the Canadian entries are still the larger and better-checked half of it. The US entries were added later and researched the same way, from owners' own websites first. They are newer, there are fewer of them, and no review scores were collected for them.
Coverage is nowhere near complete on either side of the border. A country filter sits at the top of the survey if you only want one.
What this can't tell you
- Whether the grade is still true. Satellite internet is being installed across remote North America right now. A D2 that rests on location alone can become a D1 in an afternoon, without a word changing on the owner's website.
- Whether the place is any good. The grade measures rules and signal, not quality. Read the write-up for that, then read the owner's own site.
- Current prices, seasons or availability. Price bands are rough and seasons change. Every entry links straight to the owner, so check there before you plan anything.
- Exact ratings. The ratings here were collected from public review scores on the data snapshot date. They give you a sense of scale and reputation, not a live number. The US entries were added afterwards and no review scores were collected for them, so those say Not collected rather than showing a number nobody checked.
Corrections log
The first draft of this survey was put together quickly, and some of it was wrong. Checking each place against the owner's own website moved a number of grades, nearly all of them down, and mostly for the same reason: satellite internet has quietly broken the assumption that remote means unreachable. Every change is listed here instead of being quietly fixed.
Two of those corrections make the case for this whole project. Inconnu Lodge can only be reached by float plane, 180 miles from Whitehorse, and it advertises Starlink in every cabin. Eagle Mountain Lodge sits 70 km up a remote river valley in Newfoundland and tells guests that FaceTime works from their room. Neither is doing anything wrong. But neither one is somewhere you go to be unreachable.
Corrections and complaints
If you run one of these places and we've got something wrong, the fix is free, fast and comes with no conditions — including when it moves your grade down. Send us the detail and, if you can, a link to the page on your own site that says so. We never change a grade in exchange for anything.
And if you've just stayed somewhere on this list and the signal wasn't what we said it would be, that's the most useful thing anyone can send us.
Independence
- No property has paid to be listed, and none could.
- There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site. Every outgoing link goes straight to the owner.
- No advertising, no sponsored entries, no tracking scripts, and no analytics.
How this site is built
A plain static site: a handful of hand-written HTML pages, one stylesheet, one data file, no build step and nothing to install. Set in Fraunces, Inter and JetBrains Mono. You can read it without JavaScript; filtering and comparing need it.