What Are Residential Proxies?
Residential proxies route your internet traffic through IP addresses assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to real home users. These IPs belong to physical residential addresses connected via DSL, fiber, or cable internet. When you use a residential proxy, your requests appear to come from a regular household, not a server farm or corporate network.
The residential proxy market has grown rapidly since 2020, driven by demand from web scraping teams, market researchers, and ad verification companies. The appeal is straightforward: residential IPs look like normal internet users, which helps bypass basic bot detection systems that block datacenter IP ranges outright.
How Residential Proxy Networks Work
Proxy providers partner with free apps (VPNs, games, utilities) that embed an SDK. Users agree to share idle bandwidth in exchange for using the app for free.
When a proxy customer makes a request, the provider routes it through one of these residential connections. The target website sees the home user's ISP-assigned IP address.
Providers maintain pools of millions of residential IPs. Requests can be rotated across different IPs on each request or maintain sticky sessions for a set duration.
Typical Residential Proxy Use Cases
Collecting data from lightly protected sites at high volume
Checking search rankings from different geographic locations
Tracking competitor prices across e-commerce platforms
Verifying ad placements and detecting fraud across regions
Ethical Consideration
The residential proxy industry has faced scrutiny over how IPs are sourced. Some providers have been found using deceptive practices to recruit unwitting IP donors through free apps that bury proxy consent deep in terms of service. Always verify your provider's sourcing practices.
What Are Mobile Proxies?
Mobile proxies route your traffic through IP addresses assigned by cellular carriers to real 4G and 5G devices. These IPs come from the same address pools that carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, Vodafone, and AT&T assign to every smartphone on their network. The defining characteristic of mobile proxies is CGNAT (Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation), a technology that changes everything about how these IPs are perceived by websites.
Unlike residential IPs that are typically assigned one-to-one (one IP per household), mobile carrier IPs are shared among thousands of real users simultaneously. A single mobile IP address can have 50,000 or more legitimate smartphone users routing traffic through it at any given moment. This is not a bug; it is how mobile networks are fundamentally designed to handle the massive number of devices on cellular networks with a limited supply of IPv4 addresses.
How CGNAT Creates Unblockable IPs
When a phone connects to 4G/5G, the carrier assigns it a private IP internally and maps it to a shared public IP via CGNAT. Thousands of phones share each public address.
Websites see enormous volumes of real human traffic from each mobile IP. Google, Instagram, and every major platform process millions of legitimate requests from CGNAT IPs daily.
If a website blocks a mobile CGNAT IP, it simultaneously blocks 50,000+ real customers. No business can afford that level of collateral damage. This is why mobile IPs have the highest trust scores.
Mobile proxies also benefit from natural IP rotation. As devices move between cell towers, switch between WiFi and cellular, or as carriers rebalance their networks, IP assignments change organically. This creates a pattern of IP rotation that is indistinguishable from normal mobile user behavior, making mobile proxy traffic blend perfectly with legitimate traffic.
Why Mobile Proxies Have the Highest Trust Scores
CGNAT Protection
Shared by 50K+ real users per IP, making blacklisting commercially impossible
Carrier Reputation
IPs belong to trusted carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T
Natural Behavior
Traffic patterns match millions of real mobile users browsing daily
Key Differences: Head-to-Head Comparison
The following table compares residential and mobile proxies across every metric that matters. We have tested these factors across real-world use cases and compiled industry data to give you an accurate picture of how these two proxy types stack up.
| Feature | Residential | Mobile (4G/5G) | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| IP Source | Home ISP connections (DSL, fiber, cable) | Cellular carrier networks (4G/5G towers) | Mobile |
| Trust Score | Medium-High (70-85/100) | Highest (90-99/100) | Mobile |
| Detection Rate | 15-30% on protected sites | 3-8% on protected sites | Mobile |
| CGNAT Sharing | No - 1 user per IP typically | Yes - 50,000+ real users per IP | Mobile |
| Available Pool Size | 40-80M+ IPs globally | 5-20M+ IPs globally | Residential |
| IP Rotation Speed | Instant rotation, massive pool | Carrier-based rotation (30s-30min sticky) | Tie |
| Success Rate (Protected Sites) | 60-75% average | 88-95% average | Mobile |
| Cost Per GB | $1-5/GB (volume dependent) | $4-12/GB (volume dependent) | Residential |
| Best For | High-volume scraping, SEO, price monitoring | Anti-bot bypass, social media, account management | Tie |
| Average Latency | 50-150ms | 40-100ms | Mobile |
| Blacklist Risk | Medium - individual IPs get flagged | Very Low - cannot block without blocking real users | Mobile |
| Protocol Support | HTTP/S, SOCKS5 | HTTP/S, SOCKS5 | Tie |
Key Takeaway
Mobile proxies win on 7 out of 12 categories, including the most critical ones: trust score, detection rate, success rate, and blacklist risk. Residential proxies lead on pool size and raw per-GB cost. The right choice depends on whether you prioritize volume or success rate.
When to Use Residential Proxies
Despite the advantages of mobile proxies, residential proxies remain the better choice for several specific use cases. The key factor is the trade-off between cost and protection level: when your targets have moderate anti-bot measures and you need to process high volumes of data, residential proxies deliver better value per dollar.
Large-Scale Scraping at Volume
When you need to scrape millions of pages from lightly to moderately protected sites, residential proxies offer the best cost efficiency. Sites like news aggregators, public government databases, and many e-commerce listings pages do not employ aggressive anti-bot measures. For these targets, the lower per-GB cost of residential proxies ($1-5/GB) provides significant savings at scale compared to mobile proxies.
Geo-Targeted Data Collection
Residential proxies typically offer broader geographic coverage with IPs in more countries and cities. If you need to check search results, pricing, or content availability from 100+ different locations, the massive pool size of residential networks (40-80M+ IPs) gives you more granular geographic targeting than mobile networks, which tend to concentrate IPs in major markets.
Price Monitoring and Comparison
E-commerce price monitoring often involves checking thousands of product pages repeatedly. Most product pages have basic bot protection that residential IPs handle well. The high volume of requests makes the lower per-GB cost of residential proxies more economical for daily or hourly price checks across large product catalogs.
SEO Rank Tracking
Checking search engine rankings from different locations requires geo-diverse IPs but does not typically face the aggressive anti-bot measures found on social media platforms. Google does rate-limit aggressively, but residential IPs with proper pacing deliver consistent results for SEO rank tracking at a fraction of mobile proxy costs.
When to Use Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxies are the clear choice when success rate matters more than raw per-GB cost. Any target with serious anti-bot protection, behavioral analysis, or IP reputation scoring will perform dramatically better through mobile carrier IPs. The CGNAT advantage is most pronounced against the most sophisticated defense systems.
Social Media Management
Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are built for mobile. Mobile carrier IPs match expected traffic patterns perfectly. Essential for multi-account management, content scheduling, and audience engagement at scale.
Sneaker Bots and Limited Releases
Nike SNKRS, Adidas Confirmed, and ticketing platforms use aggressive bot detection. Mobile proxies are the only proxy type with consistently high checkout success rates on these platforms.
Cloudflare and Anti-Bot Bypass
Cloudflare, PerimeterX, Datadome, and Akamai all assign high trust scores to mobile carrier IPs. The CGNAT factor makes mobile proxies the most effective tool for bypassing these systems.
Account Creation and Verification
Creating accounts on platforms that verify IP reputation requires the highest trust IPs available. Mobile proxies minimize phone verification triggers and reduce account flags during creation.
Ad Verification on Protected Platforms
Verifying ad placements on social media and protected publisher sites requires IPs that are not flagged as bots. Mobile IPs pass ad platform verification checks that residential IPs increasingly fail.
Anything Requiring Maximum Trust
Whenever you encounter rate limits, CAPTCHAs, or blocks with other proxy types, mobile proxies are your escalation option. If residential proxies fail, mobile proxies almost always succeed.
Pro Tip: The Hybrid Approach
Many professional teams use both proxy types strategically. Start with residential proxies for initial reconnaissance and bulk data collection. Escalate to mobile proxies for high-value targets, protected platforms, and any task where failure costs more than the proxy bandwidth. This hybrid approach optimizes both cost and success rate.
Success Rates: Real Data
The most important metric for any proxy is how often it actually works on your target platform. Marketing claims are one thing; real-world performance is another. The following data is compiled from industry benchmarks, third-party testing, and our own platform measurements across major protected websites in early 2026.
Cloudflare-Protected Sites
Nike SNKRS
Google Search
TikTok
Amazon
Data Methodology
Success rates represent successful HTTP 200 responses from target platforms without CAPTCHAs, blocks, or redirects. Tests were conducted using identical request configurations (headers, cookies, timing) with the only variable being the proxy type. Results may vary based on specific implementation, request patterns, and target site configuration changes.
Cost Analysis: True Value
The headline per-GB price does not tell the full story. Mobile proxies cost more per gigabyte, but they waste far less bandwidth on failed requests, retries, and CAPTCHA-blocked responses. To understand the true cost, you need to calculate the effective cost per successful request, which accounts for the bandwidth consumed by failures.
The True Cost Formula
Effective Cost = (Base Cost per GB) / (1 - Failure Rate)
A residential proxy at $3/GB with a 55% failure rate on Cloudflare sites has an effective cost of $6.67/GB. A mobile proxy at $6/GB with a 10% failure rate has an effective cost of $6.67/GB. At scale, mobile proxies often deliver better or equal value on protected sites because you stop paying for bandwidth that gets wasted on blocked requests.
| Scenario | Residential | Mobile | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base Cost | Effective Cost | Base Cost | Effective Cost | |
| Social Media Scraping (10K requests) | $15.00 35% retry rate | $20.25 | $24.00 5% retry rate | $25.20 |
| Cloudflare-Protected Scraping (10K requests) | $15.00 55% retry rate | $33.75 | $24.00 10% retry rate | $26.40 |
| Account Creation (1K accounts) | $8.00 50% failure rate | $16.00 | $12.00 8% failure rate | $13.04 |
| Sneaker Bot (500 checkouts) | $10.00 65% failure rate | $28.57 | $18.00 15% failure rate | $21.18 |
The Hidden Cost of Failures
Every failed request still consumes bandwidth. A residential proxy with a 55% failure rate on Cloudflare sites means you are paying for 2.2x the bandwidth you actually need. At 500GB per month, that adds up to over $1,500 in wasted spend.
Mobile Proxy ROI Advantage
Mobile proxies at $6/GB with a 5-10% failure rate deliver more successful requests per dollar on protected sites than residential proxies at $3/GB with a 35-55% failure rate. The math consistently favors mobile when targets are well-protected.
The CGNAT Advantage Explained
Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) is the single most important technical concept for understanding why mobile proxies outperform every other proxy type on protected platforms. It is not a feature that proxy providers built; it is a fundamental property of how mobile carrier networks operate, and it creates an advantage that is structurally impossible to replicate with residential or datacenter proxies.
CGNAT by the Numbers
A single mobile carrier IP can have tens of thousands of legitimate smartphones routing traffic simultaneously
Your proxy traffic is a tiny fraction of the legitimate traffic from the same IP, making statistical detection nearly impossible
Websites cannot afford to challenge or block IPs that serve their real mobile customer base
How CGNAT Works Technically
When a smartphone connects to a 4G or 5G network, the carrier assigns it a private IP address from a reserved internal range (typically in the 100.64.0.0/10 block designated for CGNAT by RFC 6598). This private IP is invisible to the outside internet. When the phone makes a request to a website, the carrier's CGNAT gateway translates the private address to a shared public IPv4 address, multiplexing thousands of devices behind each public IP using different port ranges.
CGNAT Traffic Flow
The website sees three requests from the same public IP (203.0.113.50) and has no way to determine which are from real phone users and which are from the proxy. This is not obfuscation or spoofing; it is the natural, legitimate architecture of mobile networks. Every mobile carrier in the world uses CGNAT because there simply are not enough IPv4 addresses for every smartphone to have a unique public IP.
Why CGNAT IPs Cannot Be Blacklisted
Collateral Damage is Unacceptable
Blocking a CGNAT IP blocks 50,000+ real customers. No e-commerce site, social platform, or search engine will accept losing thousands of paying users to stop one suspected bot.
Legitimate Traffic Volume is Massive
The ratio of legitimate to proxy traffic on any CGNAT IP is overwhelmingly in favor of real users. Even heavy proxy usage represents less than 0.1% of total traffic from that IP.
Natural Rotation Resets Reputation
Mobile IPs rotate naturally as devices move between towers and as carriers rebalance their CGNAT pools. Even if an IP accumulates some suspicion, it is quickly reassigned and its reputation resets.
The Residential Comparison
Residential IPs are typically assigned 1:1 to a single household. When a website detects suspicious activity from a residential IP, it can block that specific IP with minimal impact since only one user is affected. This is why residential proxy providers need pools of tens of millions of IPs; they burn through them as individual addresses get flagged and blocked. Mobile proxies do not have this problem because blocking is not a viable option for websites.
Frequently Asked Questions
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