The first consumer Starlink wearable is a dog collar

The first consumer wearable to connect through T-Mobile’s T-Satellite with Starlink service is not a smartwatch. It goes on a dog. Fi announced the Fi Ultra tracker on Tuesday, and the company says it is the world’s first consumer wearable on the network — a claim no independent tester has yet verified, though nobody has surfaced a counterexample either.

The pitch: dual-band GPS plus LTE, and when the collar leaves cellular coverage it hands off automatically to Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellites. The dog stays on the map anywhere in the United States, including the backcountry places where dogs most enthusiastically get lost.

None of this is cheap. The Ultra runs $199 for new members or $299 for existing ones, and it requires a membership at $189 a year — Engadget’s Mariella Moon reports a $20 activation fee on top for newcomers. Call it roughly $400 for year one before the dog wanders anywhere interesting.

The satellite layer Fi is building on is barely a year old. T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service launched commercially in July 2025 with messaging, and opened limited data support for third-party apps that October. SpaceX has put more than 650 direct-to-cell Starlink satellites in orbit, per Fortune’s Lily Mae Lazarus, who had the exclusive on Fi’s launch — they act as cell towers in orbit, talking to ordinary LTE radios.

“The main limitation of all the tracking products out there is that they are using the LTE network. Starlink obviously offers satellite technology—kind of omniscient access, at least in the US for now,” Fi CEO Jonathan Bensamoun told Fortune.

The unanswered question is battery. Fi’s release promises multi-day life per charge and stops there — no number, and no figure at all for how long the collar lasts when it is leaning on satellite check-ins rather than LTE. Engadget pegs real-world life at roughly two days, a steep fall from the two weeks to three months Fi quotes for its Series 3+ collar. Tom’s Hardware’s Mark Tyson lists the hardware at 68 grams with IP68 water resistance and USB-C charging. Two days is fine for a weekend hike. It is a different product from a collar you charge quarterly.

Why the dog got satellite first

Satellite on a wrist already exists, sort of. The Apple Watch Ultra 3 has sent messages via satellite since last September — but over Globalstar’s narrowband network, and only with the wearer’s cooperation. As DC Rainmaker’s hands-on describes it, you raise your wrist and orient your body toward a satellite crossing the sky.

A dog will not do that.

Which is exactly why a collar is the honest first customer for the direct-to-cell approach. The Starlink D2D stack asks nothing of the user — standard LTE hardware, no pointing ritual — but it is still bad at the things smartwatch buyers punish: latency measured in minutes, connectivity that comes and goes with satellite passes, and a power budget that eats batteries. A lost-dog tracker absorbs every one of those flaws. A position fix that arrives ninety seconds late is still a found dog. A 68-gram puck is unwearable on a human wrist and unremarkable on a Labrador. Our read: pet wearables are the beta program for the satellite-wearable stack everyone else wants to ship, run on customers who cannot complain.

Fi can afford the experiment. The company has raised $45 million, most recently a Series B led by Longview Asset Management, and expects to cross $100 million in annual recurring revenue this year, per Fortune. “The compromise between freedom and safety is something I’m trying to erase with technology,” Bensamoun told the magazine.

The satellite handoff, for now, ends at the border. Fi says global coverage is coming. The dog, presumably, has opinions it cannot transmit — at two days per charge, someone still has to remember the USB-C cable.