Just over a year ago, T-Mobile launched its home fiber internet service in the United States, buoyed by its acquisition of Lumos. At the time, T-Mobile’s fiber service reached half a million customers across the country, with speeds of up to 2 Gbps. This week, T-Mobile introduced a new 5 Gbps tier for customers who crave even more speed.

The 5 Gbps tier is priced at $90 per month and comes with a 10-year price guarantee. Given how often legacy cable internet providers would raise prices, forcing customers to jump through hoops to keep the status quo, a 10-year price lock could be very appealing to a large segment of the population. But as with most things, there is some fine print to the offer, which reads, “Taxes & fees, voluntary equipment or speed upgrades, select limited-time promotions, per-use charges, third-party services, and network management practices aren’t included.”

To get the $90/month price, you’ll also need to set up AutoPay with T-Mobile. However, to further sweeten the deal, customers will also receive a mesh Wi-Fi extender that broadens the coverage of the included Fiber gateway.

For new customers, T-Mobile is also offering two months of free service (via bill credits) and a $300 virtual prepaid debit card. T-Mobile’s pricing for the 5 Gbps plan is an aggressive deal in the home fiber market. For example, GFiber (Google) costs $100/month for 3 Gbps speeds, while the company’s 8 Gbps tier is $150/month.

T-Mobile’s new 5 Gbps plan joins the existing 2 Gbps ($70/month), 1 Gbps ($60/month), and 300 Mbps ($45/month) plans. All of the plans feature symmetrical upload/download speeds, which is a big upgrade for anyone coming from a traditional cable internet provider.

For people who don’t have access to T-Mobile’s growing fiber footprint in the U.S., the company also offers its unlimited 5G Home Internet service, with prices starting at $50/month.

Russian bot traffic showed signs of slowing down after Ukraine bombed some of Yandex’s biggest data centers. Unfortunately, while the attacks have slowed down overall bot traffic from Russia, Cloudflare reports that malicious bots appeared to have simply transferred to other hosting ASNs like Radist and Selectel. Overall traffic on Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud continues to stay at 10% to 15% of normal traffic levels, meaning the network remains disrupted. Cloudflare noted that traffic from the former is composed mostly of verified search crawlers indexing websites, meaning traffic from this service is mostly legitimate. On the other hand, the latter experienced a drop in malicious activities such as vulnerability scanning and probing after the data center bombings, but Cloudflare says that “high-volume automation did not vanish — it simply migrated to other hosting providers.”

This was evident with one Cloudflare customer in the gambling sector: it saw malicious bot requests from Yandex.Cloud drop to zero but started seeing the same activity being routed through other networks. “Overall, Russian bot traffic targeting gambling accounts remained essentially flat over the week, moving from 167.7 million to 170.1 million requests (+1.4%),” the company wrote in its analysis. “The automation never stopped running; the operators simply migrated their workloads to alternate cloud providers once Yandex.Cloud became unavailable.”

The company also looked at social media traffic and found a similar result — traffic from Russian-origin IPs only dropped by 0.6% in the same period while Russian bot traffic hitting “post,” “reply,” and “like” on one platform only decreased by 5.7%. Because of this, Cloudflare debunked the theory that Ukrainian strikes have caused a drop in social media manipulation, although it also noted that the scope of its analysis is limited to traffic that passed through Cloudflare services.

Since cloud-based workloads can easily be transferred between data centers, taking a few out will not necessarily end the services running out of them. Instead, owners and operators could simply migrate to another data center, which is exactly what Amazon advised its clients who have been affected by Iranian strikes on AWS Bahrain and AWS Abu Dhabi.

Cloudflare pointed out that this is why it’s difficult to defend against automated threats like bot networks — even though an IP prefix gets blocked or the physical infrastructure behind them gets annihilated, their operators could simply move their operations to another provider in a matter of hours and quickly return to normal traffic levels.

Amid growing community backlash, SpaceXAI offered a 50% discount to anyone living near its two data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and claimed that thousands have already taken advantage of the promotion. Aside from the discounts offered to residents of the city and neighboring Southaven, Mississippi, SpaceXAI Memphis said in its X post that it’s also waiving the upfront hardware cost for the recently launched Starlink V5 rental kit across all plans, saving users up to $349 in one-time costs.

Critics say that Elon Musk is simply making this move to buy goodwill with his neighbors, especially as his data centers have been in hot water over the deployment of unpermitted turbines to deliver much-needed power. "Communities in Memphis and North Mississippi aren’t asking for discounted internet service,” SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia told PCMag. “They're asking xAI to shut down its illegal, unpermitted power plant that continues to pump out staggering amounts of harmful (sic) pollution, including smog-forming nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde.” While SpaceXAI has since promised to remove all 69 of its unpermitted generators, it says it will do so only over a span of one year as its 1.2 GW power plant comes online to replace them.

Starlink residential plans are available in three tiers: 100 Mbps for $55 a month, 200 Mbps for $85 a month, and Max for $130 a month. Residents who subscribe to any of these plans could get them for just $27.50, $42.50, or $65, respectively, resulting in massive savings. This makes the cheapest Starlink plan more affordable than other internet service providers like AT&T and Xfinity, whose plans often start at $35 to $40 per month.

However, those competitors offer fiber-based connections with speeds up to 300 Mbps, meaning users would be getting a downgrade if they switch over. However, some users in the r/memphis subreddit commented that this is a great option for areas of Memphis and Southaven that still lack fiber access, and it could also be a useful backup for those who need reliable internet service. There were also several complaints about outrageous fees from other options, which drive their internet costs well above $40, making the $27.50 monthly fee for the 100 Mbps Starlink plan a tempting option. Interestingly, the company is also offering the same discount in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, where SpaceX plans to build its new spaceport.

While the company’s social media post makes it seem like 2,000 is an achievement, it’s still a small number relative to the city's total population. The latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Memphis alone has a population of over 600,000 people and more than 250,000 households. That means the new subscribers account for less than 1% of the total homes in the city. Aside from that, SpaceXAI’s latest earnings report says that it has more than 12 million subscribers, so the 2,000 new subscribers from the city are just a drop in the company’s massive bucket of Starlink users.