How connected is the NWT? The numbers, sourced.

None of these numbers are ours. We did not survey anyone, model anything, or estimate a single value. Everything below was published by the GNWT Bureau of Statistics or Statistics Canada, is free to download, and is linked at the bottom of this page so you can check us. Our contribution is assembly: three public datasets, put side by side, with the caveats left in rather than trimmed out.

We built this because we kept hearing connectivity discussed in the NWT with confidence and without figures — and because when we went looking for the figures ourselves, they turned out to be sitting in spreadsheet downloads that most people will never open. If you are writing a grant application, a council report, a business case or a news story, take what you need. Cite the government, not us.

One honest caveat before the first number: this page is a set of snapshots, not a trend line. We have not compared these figures to earlier years or quarters, so nothing here tells you whether the territory is getting more connected or less. Anyone who tells you a direction of travel from these three files alone is going beyond the data.

First, the letters. They matter more than the percentages.

Statistics Canada publishes a data-quality letter beside its estimates, because a survey figure built on a handful of responses is not the same animal as one built on thousands. The scale runs: A — excellent, B — very good, C — good, D — acceptable, E — use with caution, and F — too unreliable to publish.

Strip the letters off and nothing is left on the number to warn the next person who quotes it, which is how a cautious estimate travels as a settled fact. We have left every letter attached. Where a figure is graded E — use with caution, we say so in the sentence itself, in plain words, not in small print. There is exactly one E on this page and you will not be able to miss it.

A general pattern worth knowing before you go further: territorial figures are graded at least as well as the urban and rural splits underneath them, and often better. That is normal — smaller groups mean fewer responses mean weaker estimates — but it means the NWT-wide numbers on this page are the sturdy ones, and the urban/rural breakdowns should be treated as indicative rather than precise.

1. Home internet access, all 33 communities

This is the figure most people are actually asking about, and it exists at community level. All percentages in this section are households with home internet access, from the 2024 NWT Community Survey, published by the GNWT Bureau of Statistics. As-of: 2024. The survey publishes 33 communities, and all 33 are below — not a selection, not the large ones, not the ones we happen to work in. Ranked highest to lowest.

Before the first number, one thing we owe you. Rule 03 above promises a data-quality letter beside every figure. This section has none, and that is not an oversight on our part. The A-to-F grading belongs to Statistics Canada. The 2024 NWT Community Survey is a GNWT Bureau of Statistics product, and the Bureau does not publish A-to-F letters alongside these community figures. So there are no letters to print here, and we are not going to invent any — a made-up letter would be worse than an absent one. The letter-graded figures begin in section 2. What the Bureau publishes instead, and how to read it, is set out immediately after the figures below.

What that actually shows — and what it doesn't

The finding, stated flatly: across all 33 communities the survey publishes, home internet access runs from 98.2% in Yellowknife down to 56.5% in Fort Providence. That is a difference of 41.7 percentage points — 98.2 minus 56.5 — inside a single territory. The regional figures point the same way, though less sharply, because averaging flattens things: 97.8% in the Yellowknife Area against 70.5% in the Dehcho, from the same survey in the same year.

The territorial headline of 90.9% is true, and on its own it is misleading. It is an average sitting on top of a 41.7-point spread. If you are designing a service, a program or a website for "the NWT", the territorial number is not the one that should shape your decisions — the community numbers are.

Six of the 33 are communities we publish a page for — Yellowknife (98.2%), Fort Smith (94.3%), Inuvik (93.8%), Hay River (90.6%), Fort Simpson (77.9%) and Behchokǫ̀ (69.6%) — and they are marked as such in the grid above. We have flagged them so you can see our own coverage against the full list rather than take our word for how representative it is. It plainly is not representative: four of those six are among the eight highest community figures in the survey. Our coverage skews toward the more connected end of the territory, which is worth knowing when you read anything else we write about the North.

The pattern we did not expect: remoteness does not predict connectivity

The Bureau publishes these figures as a spreadsheet download; we have put all 33 rows into one ranked list. That is the reason publishing all 33 mattered rather than the handful we started with.

Being small and remote does not put a community at the bottom of this table. Three of the four highest community figures in the survey belong to communities that are among the smallest and most remote in the territory: Łutselk'e at 96.4%, Sachs Harbour at 96.0% and Paulatuk at 95.3%. All three sit above Fort Smith, above Inuvik, above Hay River, and above the territorial average of 90.9%. Meanwhile the lowest community figure in the survey — Fort Providence at 56.5% — belongs to a community on the highway system.

So: be careful with the assumption that remote means disconnected. We have heard it said about Northern connectivity with real confidence, and the government's own community-level data does not support it. If you are writing a funding application, a policy brief or an article and you are about to argue that a community needs something because it is remote and therefore poorly connected, check this table first — for several communities that sentence is simply false, and the people who live there will know it is false.

Now the restraint that has to come with that. We are describing a pattern in one year of one survey, not an explanation of it. We do not know why these figures fall where they do, and this data cannot tell us. It may reflect satellite and fibre projects, community-level programs, housing stock, household size, who answered the survey, or something none of us have thought of. We are not claiming remoteness makes a community more connected — that would be the same lazy move as the assumption we just asked you to drop, only pointing the other way. The honest statement is the narrow one: on these figures, remoteness does not predict connectivity, so do not use it as a proxy. Anyone wanting to know why will need a different study than this one.

Now the limitations, because they change how you may use this.

Enterprise is absent from this survey — absent, not zero. The community was excluded from the 2024 collection following the 2023 wildfires, which is why it is not among the 33 above. If you see Enterprise missing from a chart built on this data, that is why. It is not a community with no internet; it is a community with no data point, and the two must never be drawn the same way. If you are rebuilding this table yourself, leave Enterprise out with a note rather than plotting it at zero.

Suppressed cells are not zeros. In several small communities, sub-categories are published as x, meaning the value was withheld for data-quality reasons. The community totals are intact. A suppressed cell read as a zero is one of the most common and most damaging errors made with Northern statistics, and it always distorts in the same direction — it makes small communities look worse than the data says they are.

These figures do not carry Statistics Canada's A-to-F letters, as flagged before the table. The A-to-F grading described above belongs to the Statistics Canada surveys used in sections 2 and 3. The 2024 NWT Community Survey is a GNWT Bureau of Statistics product, and we can tell you what it does and does not publish rather than guess at why: it does not publish A-to-F quality letters alongside these community figures, and it does publish suppression — those x markers, indicating cells withheld for data-quality reasons. That is the observation. We are not going to theorise about the Bureau's internal methodology beyond it, and we are not going to invent letters it never issued.

And a note on what "access" means. The survey measures households reporting home internet access. It is not a measure of speed, reliability, cost, or how well the connection works in February. A household on an expensive, slow or intermittent connection is counted the same as a household on fibre. Anyone using this number to argue that connectivity is solved in a given community is using it for something it cannot do.

One more piece of restraint worth naming: we have not published the mirror-image figure — the share of households without access. It is tempting to subtract each percentage from 100 and print the result, but a survey remainder can include unstated and non-responding households, so the complement is not automatically a clean count of households with no internet. The survey publishes access; we publish access.

2. What NWT businesses have actually adopted

Households are one half of the picture. The other half is businesses, and here the source changes: Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, first quarter of 2026 (tables 33-10-1129-01 and 33-10-1130-01), republished for the territory by the GNWT Bureau of Statistics. Collected 2 January to 6 February 2026 — the freshest data on this page.

Read plainly: in the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions for the first quarter of 2026, 59.1% of NWT businesses report adopting no new technologies in the previous three years — near enough to six in ten — while 40.9% did adopt (both graded C, good; these are the two halves of the same question, and 59.1 + 40.9 = 100). Outside the urban centres the non-adoption figure rises to 68.8%, and the urban figure is 53.6%. Adoption by the same split: 46.4% urban (C, good) and 31.2% rural (D, acceptable).

The rural figures are graded D — acceptable — and the territorial ones C. That difference is not decoration. The 68.8% is a real published estimate and it is as weak as any number in this section. There is clearly a gap between rural and urban adoption in this survey; we are not going to put a precise size on it, because the rural side of the subtraction is the softer of the two.

The figure we found most interesting is the last one. Of the NWT businesses that did adopt new technology, 91.4% provided training to their employees (graded B — very good, the strongest grade in this section). Whatever the barrier to technology in the North is, that number suggests it is not an unwillingness to teach people how to use it once the decision has been made.

3. Digital infrastructure: investment, barriers, and plans

The third dataset is the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, second quarter of 2025 (Statistics Canada tables 33-10-0997-01 through 33-10-1001-01), again republished for the territory by the GNWT Bureau of Statistics. Collected 1 April to 5 May 2025. Note the date carefully: this is a different quarter, about nine months earlier than section 2 — section 2's data was collected 2 January to 6 February 2026, this section's 1 April to 5 May 2025. The two sections describe the same territory at two different moments, and stitching them into one sentence as though they were simultaneous would be wrong.

Investment over the past three years. 43.4% of NWT businesses report no investment in digital infrastructure and no plans to invest (graded C — good). The urban figure is 38.4%, graded D — acceptable. The rural figure is 50.1% — and this one is graded E, which Statistics Canada defines as "use with caution." We are printing it because deleting inconvenient estimates is its own kind of dishonesty, but you should treat that 50.1% as the softest graded number on this page. Do not headline it. Do not put it in a funding application as a hard fact. It is the direction of a finding, not the size of one.

The most-quoted number here is the easiest one to get wrong

Read the top answer carefully, because it will be misquoted. The defensible sentence is this one: the most common reason NWT businesses give for not investing in digital infrastructure is that they do not consider it relevant to their operations — 55.5%, graded C, good, in the second quarter of 2025.

What that sentence does not say: it does not say those businesses reject technology, are behind, are uninformed, or would change their minds if someone explained it better. "Not relevant to the business or organization" is one option on a list of primary barriers, chosen by the respondent. It is a statement about their own operations, and it may well be correct about them. We have no data on why they chose it, and neither does anyone else quoting this table.

Two other findings are worth holding next to it. Only 6.1% named limited access to infrastructure in the region as their primary barrier (B, very good), and only 6.6% named a lack of technical expertise (A, excellent — the single best-graded estimate on this page). Cost is a bigger factor than either, at 13.6% territorially (B, very good), and it splits in a direction that may surprise people: 17.8% urban (C, good) against 8.1% rural (B, very good). Meanwhile 10.8% of NWT businesses reported no barriers at all (B, very good).

So the picture the government's own data paints is not primarily one of businesses blocked by bad infrastructure or missing skills. On these figures, the largest single barrier is a judgement about relevance.

Nearly half of NWT businesses — 48.4%, graded C (good) — planned to adopt no new technologies at all in the twelve months following spring 2025. Among those that did plan something, the leader was not the technology that gets the headlines. Security software tools, at 12.8% (B, very good), came ahead of cloud computing at 11.5% (B, very good) and AI software at 8.4% (B, very good).

These four figures are not four slices of one pie and should not be drawn as one. A business can plan several technologies, or none, so the categories overlap and the "none" figure is a separate answer rather than the remainder of the others.

What this page does not tell you

This is the section that is easiest to leave out, and it is the reason we would trust this page if someone else had written it.

It is not a trend. Three collection windows — a 2024 survey year and two single quarters, spring 2025 and winter 2026 — are three snapshots. We have not set them against earlier periods. Nothing on this page supports a sentence beginning "the NWT is becoming more…" or "less…".

The three datasets are not interchangeable. Section 1 counts households, by community, in a GNWT survey. Sections 2 and 3 count businesses, split urban and rural, in two different quarters of a Statistics Canada survey. The urban/rural split used for businesses is not the same thing as the community list used for households, and mapping one onto the other — deciding that "rural" means Behchokǫ̀ and Fort Simpson, say — would be an assumption we cannot support.

The splits are weaker than the totals. In the two Statistics Canada surveys used in sections 2 and 3, every territorial figure is graded C or better, while several urban and rural figures are graded D and one is graded E — use with caution. If you quote only one figure from those two sections, quote a territorial one. This does not apply to section 1, which carries no grades at all — not even for its territorial figure — because the GNWT Bureau of Statistics does not publish A-to-F letters with the 2024 NWT Community Survey.

It does not explain the community differences. The page shows that remoteness does not predict connectivity in this dataset, which is enough to retire a common assumption. It is not enough to replace it with a better one. We have no data on cause, and one survey year cannot supply it.

Enterprise is absent, and suppressed cells are not zeros. Worth repeating because it is the error we most expect to see downstream, and because it always distorts in the same direction — against small communities.

Access is not quality. A household counted as having home internet may have a connection that is slow, expensive, capped, or unreliable. None of that is in these numbers.

And these are surveys. Every figure is an estimate produced from a sample, which is precisely why the quality letters exist. They are the best public figures available for the territory. They are not a census of every household and business in the North.

Sources, in full — go and check us

Section 1 — home internet access, all 33 communities, the territory and the six regions. GNWT Bureau of Statistics, 2024 NWT Community Survey, "Home Internet Access, by Characteristic and Community – 2024". As-of 2024. Index page: statsnwt.ca/Housing/internet_usage.html, where the figures are published as a downloadable spreadsheet, Home Internet Access_2024.xlsx. Every community figure on this page is transcribed from that one file — no other source contributed a single percentage to section 1.

Sections 2 and 3 — business technology and digital infrastructure. Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, republished for the territory by the GNWT Bureau of Statistics at statsnwt.ca/economy/BusinessDynamics. Section 2 uses the first quarter of 2026, tables 33-10-1129-01 and 33-10-1130-01, collected 2 January to 6 February 2026. Section 3 uses the second quarter of 2025, tables 33-10-0997-01 through 33-10-1001-01, collected 1 April to 5 May 2025.

If you are citing this material, cite the government. The Bureau of Statistics and Statistics Canada did the work; we opened the files and put them in order. There is nothing on this page you could not verify yourself in an afternoon, and we would rather you did.

If you think we have got something wrong — a figure transcribed incorrectly, a quality letter misread, a caveat we should have named — tell us and we will correct the page. Getting this right matters more to us than looking authoritative. The same habit applied to your own website: what you actually own →