Welcome back to our weekly roundup of what cellular and satellite networking pros are talking about. This week was dominated by Starlink pricing, a stubborn T-Mobile fiber outage, and a fresh enterprise hotspot landing on two carriers. Here are the stories worth your time.
Starlink Price Increases Hit June Bills
Starlink raised monthly pricing on its Residential and Roam plans, and the new rates are now showing up on June billing dates for existing customers, not just new signups. The entry Residential 100 Mbps plan moved from $50 to $55, Residential 200 Mbps went from $80 to $85, and Residential MAX climbed from $120 to $130. Starlink also rolled out a new $10 Monthly Kit Fee for customers who rent rather than buy hardware, which ends the era of free rental equipment.
This matters most for the many field, fleet, and remote-site customers who bond Starlink with cellular through a Peplink or Pepwave router. If Starlink is one leg of your failover or SpeedFusion setup, the higher recurring cost changes the math on how much cellular data you lean on. You can review the official plan details on the Starlink updates page.
T-Mobile Fiber Outage Drags Into a Fifth Day
T-Mobile Fiber (T-Fiber) customers across the Southeast, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, kept reporting outages into early June after a disruption stretched past five days. Cities like High Point, Burlington, and Wilmington saw prolonged downtime. Worth stressing: this hit T-Mobile’s wireline home broadband built partly on its Lumos acquisition, not the nationwide wireless network, which kept running normally. It is a useful reminder that single-provider wireline service is exactly the failure mode a cellular or satellite backup is built to cover.
Inseego MiFi PRO M4 Now on AT&T and T-Mobile
Inseego’s enterprise-grade MiFi PRO M4 is now available on both AT&T (model M4040, $209.99) and T-Mobile for Business (model M4020, $199.99). The M4 runs the Qualcomm X72 modem, adds dual-band Wi-Fi 7, and includes a Gigabit Ethernet port plus two TS-9 antenna ports. The carrier variants share the same core hardware and differ mainly in supported bands, so it is a strong managed-mobility option for distributed teams that want one device family across networks.
Firmware and Security Watch
Peplink’s Firmware 8.6.0 Beta 1 is circulating, bringing SpeedFusion Boost for stronger single-session TCP performance, RADIUS over TLS for Wi-Fi, and expanded per-WAN bandwidth controls. As always with a beta, hold production gear back until it reaches a stable release. Separately, the Peplink community continues to flag that Starlink dish firmware updates can briefly knock connected Peplink routers offline in bridge mode, so plan maintenance windows accordingly.
Digi launched Remote Reach, a peer-to-peer direct device access feature for Digi Remote Manager subscribers, alongside its first Long Term Support firmware release for DAL OS. Teltonika continues shipping RutOS updates that add centralized Site Manager control plus routine security fixes. Across the board, keeping cellular and router firmware current remains the cheapest security control you have.
On the vulnerability front, our own RouterCVE Report Card tells a clean story for the brands we carry. Peplink, Cradlepoint, Digi, Inseego, and Semtech all hold A+ grades with zero new CVEs in the last 30 days, and Teltonika sits at A+ with just one. The contrast with common migration-source brands is stark: in the trailing 30 days RouterCVE logged 20 new CVEs for TRENDnet, 13 for Netgear, 10 each for Cisco and GL.iNet, 9 for Inhand, 7 for Palo Alto Networks, and 5 for TP-Link, with Fortinet, Linksys, and TP-Link all trending in the wrong direction.
Spectrum and Industry
Regulatory pressure on restricted-vendor hardware continued. The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issued a June 1 public notice on conditional approvals and exemptions tied to foreign-made routers under the Covered List, the running list of gear barred from new equipment authorizations. You can track it on the FCC Covered List page. If your fleet still includes restricted-vendor devices, now is the time to plan replacements.
On spectrum, the FCC is moving toward auctioning up to 180 MHz of upper C-band (3.98 GHz to 4.2 GHz) for 5G and 6G, with a deadline to finish by July 2027. EchoStar keeps shedding spectrum after deals with AT&T and SpaceX, and Verizon is reportedly in talks to buy AWS-3 licenses. AT&T, meanwhile, is chasing more 3.45 GHz capacity. More licensed midband generally means better fixed wireless and failover performance down the road.
Note: Reddit remains blocked to our search tooling, so social chatter from r/Peplink, r/Starlink, r/tmobileisp and similar communities was not fully captured this week.
5Gstore Take
The throughline this week is resilience. A multi-day single-provider fiber outage, a Starlink price bump, and steady firmware churn all point to the same lesson: networks that survive are the ones with a second path and current firmware. If Starlink’s new pricing has you rebalancing toward cellular, a bonding router from Peplink or a rugged edge router from Cradlepoint keeps you online when one link fails. For industrial and IoT sites, Digi and Teltonika pair remote management with strong security track records, while Semtech / Sierra Wireless AirLink gateways remain a fleet favorite. Need a quick-deploy hotspot for a new site or a mobile team? The new Inseego MiFi PRO M4 and plug-and-play Katalyst routers are both easy wins.
Not sure which path fits your sites or how the Starlink changes affect your plan? Contact our team and we will help you build a setup that stays connected.
FAQ
Do the new Starlink prices affect customers who already have service?
Yes. The higher Residential and Roam rates apply to existing customers starting on their June billing date, not just new signups.
Was the recent T-Mobile outage on the wireless network?
No. It affected T-Mobile Fiber (T-Fiber), the wireline home broadband service. The nationwide cellular network kept operating normally during the event.
Should I install Peplink Firmware 8.6.0 yet?
Not on production gear. It is still a beta. Wait for the stable release, or reach out to us if you want to test it safely on a non-critical device first.
About the Author
Michael Ginsberg is the founder of 5Gstore.com, a trusted source for cellular routers and failover networking solutions since 2005. With a background in software and networking dating back to 1988, he writes about cellular connectivity, IoT infrastructure, network security, and fleet management. Connect with Michael on LinkedIn or reach the 5Gstore team through our contact page.
