Mobile Proxy, Explained: One Carrier SIM, One Customer, Your Rules

A mobile proxy is a cellular connection you borrow. Your traffic goes to a modem holding a SIM card on AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, leaves through that SIM's address, and comes back the same way, so the website at the other end sees a phone on a US carrier rather than your laptop or your server. ProxyMobile rents that connection as a dedicated line: one modem, one SIM, one customer, in one of eight American cities, with the IP changing only when you say so. If this is your first mobile proxy, this page walks through what it is, how it differs from the other proxy types, how to plug it into whatever you already use, and what it costs by the hour, the day, the week and the month.

What a dedicated line costs

The same modem and SIM on every row. The only decisions are how long you keep it and whether it runs on 4G or 5G.

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What a mobile proxy is, in plain words

Every phone with a data plan has an IP address from its carrier. A mobile proxy puts that kind of address at your disposal without the phone: a SIM card sits in a modem in a rack, the modem is attached to the carrier exactly as a handset would be, and a small proxy server on that machine forwards whatever you send through the SIM. You connect to the proxy with a host, a port and a login, and from then on the sites you visit see the carrier's address instead of yours.

The important word is carrier. The address is not ours and not a hosting company's; it is issued by AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon to a SIM on a real plan, and it is shared through the carrier's network with thousands of other subscribers at any moment. That sharing is what gives the address its reputation. When a platform looks it up, it sees the carrier's name and a city, and it behaves the way it behaves toward any phone.

On ProxyMobile the modem is dedicated. Nobody else sends traffic through your SIM while the line is yours, which means the address history during your rental is your history and nobody else's.

Datacenter, residential and mobile: how the three compare

A datacenter proxy lives on a server in a hosting facility. It is quick and inexpensive, and it is also the easiest to spot, because the address block is registered to a hosting company and most anti-fraud systems flag those blocks on sight. It is fine for tasks that nobody is defending against and poor for anything involving an account.

A residential proxy exits through someone's home internet connection, usually one of thousands enrolled in a pool. The address looks like a household, which is better, but it is one household: if the previous user of that address did something unwelcome, you inherit the consequence. Most residential services also bill per gigabyte, so heavy work gets expensive quickly.

A mobile proxy exits through a carrier. Because the carrier shares each address across many real phones, blocking it is costly for the platform and rarely done, and because the address is recycled through the carrier's pool, no single history sticks to it for long. The trade is that a real SIM in real hardware costs more than a slice of a pool, which is why a dedicated mobile line is priced by the day rather than by the request.

Dedicated means one customer per modem

Many mobile proxy services are pools: a fleet of phones or modems that hundreds of customers share, each getting a slot for a few minutes. That can work for one-off requests, but it means you never know what the previous occupant did, and it means your sticky session is only as sticky as the pool allows.

A ProxyMobile line is the opposite. You rent the device, not a turn on it. The SIM is yours for the term, the rotation schedule is yours, the bandwidth is yours, and the credentials are issued to you alone. You can lock the line to a username and password or to an IP you whitelist, and switch between the two from the dashboard without interrupting traffic.

The hardware behind the line is a USB modem by default. If you need a line that stays up for months without a reset we can place it on a cellular router, and if your work inspects the device itself, not only the address, there are real phones on real plans.

Connecting your first mobile proxy

When the line activates, the dashboard shows a host, a port for HTTP(S) and a port for SOCKS5, and your login. Paste those into the proxy settings of whatever you are using: the network settings on a phone or computer, the proxy field in a browser profile, the configuration of a scraper or an automation tool, or a single curl command to confirm the exit address. SOCKS5 carries UDP, so apps and games that rely on it work too.

If you would rather not store a password in a tool, whitelist the IP you connect from instead and leave the login fields blank. The setup guides in the resources section walk through the common browsers and tools step by step, and the checker on the tools page shows the carrier, the city and the exit address of your line so you can confirm it before pointing anything important at it.

Changing the IP: rotation and sticky sessions

A mobile proxy changes its address by dropping the carrier connection and reconnecting, at which point the carrier assigns a fresh one from its pool. On a ProxyMobile line you trigger that in four ways: a button in the dashboard, a personal rotation link you can call from any script, the API, or a timer that rotates on an interval you set. Rotations are unlimited on every plan and take a few seconds each.

If you never trigger one, the address stays put for as long as the carrier keeps it assigned, usually hours at a stretch. That is a sticky session, and it is what you want for anything with a login, because the site sees one phone behaving normally rather than a user whose address jumps between page loads. The new address after a rotation comes from the same carrier in the same city, so your line never wanders to another state.

Speed and the daily allowance

A 4G LTE line typically delivers 20 to 45 Mbps and a 5G line 50 Mbps and more, depending on the signal at the rack. For browsing, posting, account work and ordinary scraping, 4G is plenty. For video, large page renders or many simultaneous sessions through one address, the 5G line is the better buy and costs two dollars more per day.

Every plan includes 15 GB of traffic per day, which resets daily. That is a generous working day for almost every use of a single line; the people who approach it are running many headless browsers at once, and for them a second line costs less than the trouble of managing one line at its limit. We do not meter on top of the allowance and we do not slow a line that has been busy.

Prices, payment and the first 24 hours

A 4G line is five dollars for a day, thirty for a week and seventy for thirty days. The 5G line is seven, thirty-five and eighty-five. If you only want to try one, the hourly plan is two dollars for the first two hours on 4G or three dollars on 5G, then the same amount for each extra hour up to four hours in one purchase, and it never renews by itself. Keep the line a full day and the hours you paid count toward the day price.

Pay by card, PayPal, crypto, Zelle or wire. The line is active the moment the payment clears, and if it does not do the job you bought it for, write to support within the first 24 hours of your first order and we refund it. Support answers by email and Telegram around the clock, and the setup is simple enough that most first-time buyers are connected within a few minutes.

What people put through a mobile proxy

The pattern is always the same: a website or app that treats phones better than servers, and work that needs to look like a phone.

• Creating and running social, e-commerce and service accounts from a steady carrier address
• Scraping and rank tracking that needs the mobile version of a page from a specific US city
• Ad verification and price checks where the result depends on where the visitor appears to be
• Testing apps and games over a real carrier connection, with UDP
• Watching marketplaces for counterfeit or unauthorized listings as an ordinary shopper would

Mobile proxy questions, answered plainly