Fi has launched the Fi Ultra, a dog tracker that adds satellite connectivity through T-Mobile's T-Satellite with Starlink service, extending location tracking to areas with no cellular coverage Engadget. The device is designed to maintain a location fix on a dog anywhere in the continental US, including rural terrain and backcountry beyond the reach of terrestrial cell towers.

The core mechanism is a failover between radio access technologies. When LTE is available, the Fi Ultra behaves like prior Fi hardware, reporting location over cellular. When it loses that connection, it switches automatically to T-Satellite, T-Mobile's direct-to-device satellite service built on Starlink's constellation, without requiring any action from the owner. The result, per Fi's design intent, is continuous location reporting regardless of where the animal ends up — a meaningful capability shift for a product category historically bounded by cell tower density.

That capability comes with a tradeoff in endurance. The Fi Ultra's battery lasts approximately two days per charge, a sharp drop from the two weeks to three months owners get from the existing Fi Series 3+ hardware Engadget. Satellite radios are power-hungry relative to LTE modems, and maintaining a link capable of connecting to low-earth-orbit satellites evidently draws down the cell faster than the Bluetooth/LTE combination in Fi's older lineup. Owners relying on the Ultra for extended off-grid trips will need to manage charging cadence accordingly, a constraint that will matter more to hunters and backcountry hikers than to suburban dog owners whose animals rarely leave cell range.

Beyond connectivity, the Fi Ultra ships with several behavioral and safety features layered on top of location data. A "callback" system uses sounds and vibrations to prompt a dog to return on command, functioning as a remote recall aid independent of the owner's physical presence. "Lost Mode," triggered from the Fi app, escalates the tracker's polling frequency and reporting cadence when a dog goes missing. That mode also activates "Search Party," a crowd-sourced detection feature that lets nearby Fi users' devices passively detect a lost dog's tracker signal, functionally similar to how Apple's Find My network or Tile's crowd-finding leverages other users' hardware as ad hoc relay points. Fi says it plans to add Safe Zone boundary triggers — sound and vibration alerts when a dog crosses a geofence — in a coming update, though no firm rollout date accompanied the announcement.

The hardware is built to be collar-agnostic, compatible with most standard collars and harnesses rather than requiring Fi's own strap system, which differs from the fully integrated design of the company's Series 3 Plus collar where tracking hardware is built into the collar band itself tryfi.com.

Pricing follows Fi's existing subscription-plus-hardware model. New members pay $199 for the tracker itself, a $20 activation fee, and $189 annually for the subscription that powers cellular and satellite connectivity, cloud data, and app features Engadget. Existing Fi Series 3+ or Mini subscribers can add a Fi Ultra unit for $299 layered onto their current plan rather than paying the full new-member bundle. Fi also offers a one-month free trial with device purchase tryfi.com.

The Fi Ultra sits alongside Fi's broader platform, which the company says serves millions of pets worldwide tryfi.com. The existing Series 3 Plus collar already tracks behaviors such as scratching, licking, and barking, and monitors eating and drinking to surface diet and hydration insights. Fi Intelligence, an AI-powered layer introduced across the platform, generates breed-specific health and behavior guidance from a given dog's accumulated sensor data. The Ultra's satellite capability extends that same data pipeline into geography the Series 3 Plus was never built to cover.

The broader context here is the diffusion of direct-to-device satellite connectivity out of flagship smartphones and into narrower consumer hardware categories. T-Satellite launched as a consumer-facing feature aimed at emergency messaging for phone users in dead zones; seeing a carrier license that infrastructure to a pet-tracking startup suggests telecom operators are treating satellite backhaul as a wholesale capability to sell into IoT categories more broadly, not just a headline feature for their own handset customers. Whether other trackers — for hikers, for cargo, for livestock — follow a similar path is a reasonable question raised by this launch rather than one the launch itself answers.

Separately, Fi's marketing campaign for the Ultra won recognition at the 2026 Creative Circle Awards Shots, though that award speaks to the campaign's creative execution rather than the product's technical merits.

For owners of large-territory or working dogs — hunting breeds, herding dogs on unfenced land, dogs prone to bolting on trailheads — the tradeoff Fi is offering is legible: better worst-case location coverage in exchange for daily rather than weekly charging. Whether that tradeoff suits a given household will depend heavily on how often a dog actually leaves cellular range in the first place, a calculation most suburban owners will rarely need to make.