When I first got online in 1994, a Usenet group participant mentioned that the largest land mass without internet service was Sumatra. 25 years later, I’m pretty sure Sumatra has at least dial-up, but I wonder what island holds this distinction now? North Sentinel Island, maybe? If they had phones, I wonder if they could pick up a signal from nearby Smith island?
Satellite networks and satphones with at least limited internet capability (I don’t mean cell phones, but things like Iridium phones) make your definition of “no internet” important. Do you mean permanent access? Similarly, define landmass. Does it necessarily need to be a populated landmass? Because there are some islands in the arctic that are pretty huge. I’m sure that every now and then they’re all liable to have a research team or something taking up temporary residence, but otherwise I think some are still unpopulated (and are likely to remain so).
ETA: Devon Island, for instance.
I think satellite broadband and even Iridium count as permanent access. No point in running thick optical cables everywhere. By that standard, every place on the planet has Internet access; welcome to the future.
Earth-to-Mars lag time would be a bit long but I guess that planet has access, too.
Fairly sure none of the Mars probes have TCP/IP links, so I don’t think they can actually be considered part of the Internet.
Can you get a satellite phone signal anywhere on the planet, even in polar regions, or are there dead zones?
I looked this up, because I thought it was a good question.
here’s Iridium’s tracking map Iridium Coverage Map - Real Time Tracking | Ground Control
it would appear that everwhere is coverered. It also seems that good/bad coverage changes as the satellites move. At time of writing, seems like strong coverage over the poles and over Japan - this will have changed by the time you read this (I think!)
There is actually better coverage at the polar regions than elsewhere. Satellite phone/internet networks must include many satellites in polar (or nearly polar) orbits to cover high latitudes, and polar orbits converge at the poles.
If we look at places with “wired” connections, then Antarctica does not have any fiber-optic connections to the rest of the world, and it’s almost certainly the largest land mass to hold that distinction. Glancing at the Submarine Cable Map, second place probably goes to Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic, which probably also has the distinction of being the largest island with permanent residents and no hard-wired connections to the outside world.
Is it coincidental that the word “iridium” is the name of a company that provides “tracking” internet access for what must be assumed are at least in part mobile devices? That use, ya know…iridium? And are in and of themselves…trackable?
Yes, it is. The name was chosen because initial calculations showed that a network of 77 satellites would be required to provide uninterrupted global coverage, and Iridium (atomic number 77) was chosen as the name on that basis. In the event it proved possible to provide full coverage with just 66 satellites, but there was no appetite to rebrand the system as Dysprosium.
Huh?? 
LOL, awesome reply, love the Dope for this, and now Ogre is screaming “NEEEEEEERRRRRDS!” in my brain.
See above. Or perhaps…not, lol.
Much of northern Canada (Nunavut) is fed only by satellite feeds to each community (ditto for phone service). I had heard of plans to run fiber up Hudson’s Bay west coast, but nothing definite yet. Inland, not a lot of settlements. There is land-based fiber feed to Churchill on Hudson’s Bay, I think.
Venus has an even larger landmass than Mars, and its atmosphere is even less conducive to functioning Internet communications.
No doubt there are even larger planets with larger land masses somewhere out there.
Apparently there’s a plan to run a cable from Greenland over to Baffin Island by 2023, so that’s something. I had assumed that it was already built when I glanced at the Submarine Cable Map
It therefore appears that Baffin Island (not Victoria Island) is the largest permanently settled landmass without a hard-wired internet connection to the outside world.