No Wi-Fi Here

Imagine that you are on holiday in Iceland. You are at a great part of the country. The scenery is great and the weather is wonderful. So many different things to take photos of. However, you can’t share them with anyone. You can’t even Google the weather for the following day. Even calling a friend is very difficult, as you need to walk up the mountain just to get a weak signal. Does it sound strange? Or even terrifying? That is exactly how life is in Hornstrandir, Iceland – the city, which declared itself a “digital-free zone.”

People living in the town have no complaints. They say that they like living without the Internet. People living in the city have been resisting cell towers for more than ten years. So far, they have been successful. Companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX are racing to deliver high-speed Internet service to everywhere in the world by putting thousands of small satellites into low Earth orbit. This may seen as a success story in many other parts of the world but definitely not in Hornstrandir.

Many destinations in the Arctic region like Canada, Russia or Alaska have difficulty in connecting the Internet. Either there is no connection or it is expensive. Actually even that doesn’t stop Iceland to be a country where about 98 percent of the population uses the Internet. Among adults, 93 percent have Facebook accounts and two-thirds are Snapchat users.

Alex doesn’t live in the city twelve months but every year he goes there for his holidays. He says that his teenage daughter refused to come to Hornstrandir this summer because it would mean not having online access. “But once the kids are here, all they do is play outside,” he said.

A tourist visiting the island said that he wanted to make a phone call, because of an emergency while he was in the city. When he asked a police officer how he could connect to the Internet to make a free international call, the police officer told him to call home from the public phone in the city center. Then he added that even the telephones may not work probably as it was a rainy day and clouds block telephone signals too.