You’re hiking.
Deep woods.
Your dog catches a scent—deer, rabbit, doesn’t matter—and vanishes into the ferns. He’s got a GPS collar, sure, but your phone has zero bars. The silence is absolute.
This isn’t a hypothetical horror story for Jonathan Bensamoun.
He built Fi. A company that’s made dog trackers since 2008. It started personal enough—he wanted to make sure the hired help was actually walking his German shepherd, Thor, and not just sitting in a park for an hour.
Fi grew fast. They became a leader. But customers kept calling back, upset.
“The number one complaint is ‘I live where the network sucks,’ or ‘My dog ran into the woods and now I’m panicked,'” Bensamoun told Space.com.
Cellular signals fail in the wild.
Period.
The fix came from the stars. Literally.
When Starlink started connecting phones directly in 2024 Bensamoun saw the path. By July 8 they had it online. The first satellite-linked dog collar in history.
Here’s how it works.
It’s got GPS to know where the dog is. A battery modem to talk to T-Mobile’s network when there’s coverage. And when the towers disappear, it looks up.
It finds a Starlink satellite.
It talks to it.
The alert goes through.
“You can set a geo-fence,” Bensamoun explained. “Like around your backyard.”
Cross that invisible line, the owner’s phone buzzes. Even if the dog is in the middle of a national park.
Battery life matters. Fi says it lasts “multiple days.” Plenty of time to find the stray. You can even trigger vibrations or sounds through the collar to guide him home.
Training works.
Vibration equals treat.
Treat equals coming back.
We’ve used GPS on animals since the 1900s, mostly on big game like moose and caribou. Clunky, expensive, useless for a Chihuahua. Technology shrunk. Prices dropped. Now the hardware is tiny.
The hardware is ready.
The network is global.
Will it work on the hyperactive terrier you adopted last month?
We’ll see when the woods get quiet. 🐾
