How Many IPs Does One Dedicated Mobile Proxy Actually Give You?

The most common question we get before a ProxyMobile order is also the simplest to ask and the hardest to answer honestly: how many IPs will I get from one line? The line is one modem with one SIM, assigned to you alone, so the answer is not a share of some vendor-wide total. It is the number of distinct addresses your carrier's gateway will hand that SIM as you rotate it. That number climbs quickly, then flattens, and it depends more on which carrier and city you picked and how often you rotate than on anything we can tune. This guide walks through what a dedicated line looks like on day one, at the end of week one, at month one and at month three, and what you should and should not read into the figures.

Where the addresses come from

Your modem's SIM attaches to the carrier's network through a packet gateway that serves its region. That gateway owns a block of public IPv4 addresses and assigns one to each data session it opens. When you rotate, the modem drops the session and opens a new one, which takes a few seconds, and the gateway assigns an address again, possibly a different one. Everything you will ever count comes out of that one block.

The block is shared with real phones through carrier grade NAT, so the address is never yours alone, and it belongs to the carrier, not to us. What is yours alone is the modem and the SIM. Nobody else rotates your line, nobody else's traffic leaves through your port, and the history of what the line has seen is the history of your own use.

Day one: everything looks new

On the first day almost every rotation lands on an address the line has not held before, because the line has no history yet. If you rotate every few minutes from the start, the distinct tally at the end of the day can be well into the dozens, and the temptation is to multiply that by thirty and call it the monthly figure. Do not. The first day is the steepest part of the curve, and it tells you what the gateway hands out most readily, not how much it holds in total.

Day one is a good moment to note two other things: how quickly a rotation completes, which on our hardware is a matter of seconds, and whether the address you land on geolocates where you expect. A few of our gateways sit one metro over from the rack. Boston AT&T lines read as New York, for instance, while Boston Verizon lines read as Boston.

Week one: the curve starts to bend

By the end of the first week a heavily rotated line has usually turned up a few hundred distinct addresses. That is the rule of thumb we give, not a measurement, and the exact figure swings with carrier and metro. What you will notice is the repeat rate rising: rotations that return an address the line held yesterday, or an hour ago, become ordinary. This is not a fault. It means the line has seen most of what its gateway routinely offers, and the remaining discoveries come from the edges of the block and from the carrier rebalancing which addresses that gateway holds.

Cadence is doing a lot of work in this number. A line rotated every two minutes will show a much bigger week-one count than the same line rotated hourly, and neither count says the pool is bigger. Divide by rotations and you get yield, the share of rotations that landed somewhere new, and yield is the figure that actually compares one line against another.

Month one and month three: the plateau that never quite stops

Over a month the distinct count keeps growing, but slowly, and by a quarter a busy line tends to have logged low thousands of addresses in total. The curve flattens because each new draw from a finite block is more likely to be a repeat, but it does not go completely flat. Gateways shift addresses between regions, carriers add and retire ranges, and a line that seemed exhausted in week three will still pick up new addresses in week ten. Anyone who tells you a line has a fixed pool of exactly so many addresses is describing a snapshot.

Depth and freshness diverge here. Depth is the growing quarterly total. Freshness is how often a rotation today gives you something you did not hold in the last day. A line can be deep in the long run and yet feel stale hour to hour, because the gateway cycles through its most-used addresses first. If freshness within the day is what your work needs, that is a carrier and city question, not a rotation-timer question.

What moves the number and what does not

Rotation settings do not change how many addresses the block contains. Rotating faster only means more draws, and more draws from the same set means more repeats. What moves the number is the carrier and the metro. On our hardware the tendencies run like this: Verizon SIMs are generous with new addresses, AT&T SIMs cling to an address and often circle back to old ones, and T-Mobile can look like either depending on the city. The same carrier is a different block in Phoenix than in Miami, so a line moved between our metros will behave differently, and moves are free.

Load on the pool matters too. On a quiet gateway, dropping the session for a few seconds often returns the same address because nobody else claimed it in the gap; on a busy gateway it is reassigned almost immediately. If your rotations keep coming back to the same address and you wanted something fresh, stay detached a little longer or rotate again, and support can lengthen the detach on the modem for you.

• Carrier: the biggest single factor in both depth and freshness.
• Metro: the same carrier is a different gateway and a different block in each of our eight cities.
• Cadence: raises the raw count, not the number of addresses available; compare by yield instead.
• Pool load: quiet gateways hand the same address back, busy ones reassign within seconds.
• Time: discovery slows after the first days but never stops, because carriers shift ranges.

Matching the line to the job

If you run long-lived accounts, you do not want a big number at all. You want a line on the stickier carrier for your account's city, left alone, holding one address for days. If you run verification, research or account onboarding, you want the line in that metro that currently yields freshest, rotated between tasks, and you should check that the new address is not one you used in the last day. If you scrape, size by requests per address rather than by pool, and spread heavy jobs across two lines in two metros rather than hammering one block. Most operators end up with a small mix.

Whatever the job, the shared carrier address is not a hiding place. Many phones sit behind it, but platforms attribute by account, device and behaviour. The address earns you a trusted carrier ASN and a consistent US city; it does not make you one of a crowd.

What to do next with ProxyMobile

Buy a single line from five dollars a day, put it on the real target and rotate it exactly as your workflow would. Note the distinct tally at the end of day one and again at the end of the week, and note how many rotations returned an address from the same day. That is your own yield figure, and it is worth more than any number we print. If it is not what the job needs, open live chat and ask which carrier in your city is rotating freshest right now. Switching carrier in the same metro or moving to another of our eight cities is free, and because the modem and SIM are yours alone, the behaviour you see is the behaviour you will keep.

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