A desk survey that says so on every page

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.

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.

The survey began as a Canadian list, and the Canadian entries are still the best-checked part of it. The US entries were added in field survey 02 and researched the same way, from owners' own websites first.

Europe and South America were added in field survey 03, on 17 August 2026. Both were researched the same way — owners' own websites first — and both are thinner than the North American half. Southern Europe, the Balkans and the Guianas are particularly incomplete, and Venezuela, Paraguay, Suriname and French Guiana have no coverage at all.

The brief for that pass was every off-grid place in Europe and South America, which is not a finite set and nobody holds it. There is no registry. A few hundred properties across both continents market themselves as off-grid or screen-free; behind them sit thousands of single-cabin listings that say "no wifi" and vanish within two seasons. So the rule stayed the same as it has always been: a place only goes in if there is enough public evidence to answer the one question. Filling four hundred rows out of listing-site boilerplate would break the thing that makes this worth reading.

The continent and country filters sit in the rail on the survey page if you only want one part of it.

Three kinds of entry don't fit a row about a property, and each is handled differently rather than forced into the shape.

Two are places rather than properties. Cabo Polonio in Uruguay and Caraíva in Brazil are villages: no owner, no booking and no site to link to. They're graded like everything else, and their entries simply leave out the parts a village can't answer.

Three are hut networks. A DNT cabin in Norway can be a staffed lodge with a card machine or an unstaffed hut you let yourself into with a key, and the grade swings from D1 to D5 inside the same organisation. Grading those as a whole would mean inventing a number, so they sit under the survey with the range stated instead.

Three are intentional communities — off-grid in the truest sense, and left out on purpose. This survey grades places that promise you'll switch off. A permaculture co-op isn't promising that; it's just living. They're listed here so the research isn't lost:

• 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. Everything added after that — the US entries, and all of Europe and South America — says Not collected rather than showing a number nobody checked.
• Which questions are still open. Some entries were published with a specific thing unconfirmed: whether a common room has Wi-Fi, whether a lodge has put up a satellite dish. Those say so on their own page, under Still to check, rather than being quietly rounded into a grade.

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.

Everything the Europe and South America pass turned up and could not research to a publishable standard. It's printed here rather than kept in a private file, because the gaps in a survey are part of what it is — and so nobody has to find them twice.

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.

• 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.

A plain static site: a handful of hand-written HTML pages, one stylesheet, two data files, 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.