A mobile proxy is a proxy whose requests reach the website from an address a mobile carrier assigned. Your phone gets the same kind of address on mobile data. A device with a SIM card sits at the far end, and the site sees a carrier's network as the source of the request. Sellers call these 4G, 5G or LTE proxies, after the radio that device uses.
Below we cover how that works, why one carrier address can stand for hundreds of people, and what Cloudflare measured about the traffic on shared addresses. We then show what 33 sellers charged per GB in 2026, and when a residential proxy does the same job for less.
Mobile proxy
proxy type
A proxy whose requests leave the internet from an address a mobile carrier assigned to a device with a SIM card. Sellers name them 4G, 5G or LTE proxies after the device's radio.
How does a mobile proxy work?
Every mobile proxy ends at a device on a carrier's network: a phone, a USB modem or a box built for the job. The device holds a SIM card and joins the network the way your phone does. The carrier hands it a public address from its own address space. A request you send through the proxy leaves the internet from that address.
The site at the other end can look up who owns the address. Every block of addresses belongs to a network with its own number, its ASN. For a mobile proxy, the owner is a mobile operator. A datacenter proxy shows a hosting company in the same lookup.
Sellers sell access to these devices in two ways:
- Through a gateway, billed per GB. You connect to one gateway, and it sends your requests out through devices on carrier networks. You can take a new address for each request or keep one for a while in a sticky session. Our mobile proxies work this way.
- As a dedicated device, billed by time. You rent one modem or one port for a day, a week or a month. ProxyEmpire, for one, sells rotating access and dedicated connections billed monthly as separate products. HProxy vs MobileHop works through which meter suits which job.
What do 4G, 5G and LTE mean in a proxy's name?
They name the radio. LTE, short for Long Term Evolution, is the standard behind most 4G service, and 5G is the generation after it. A "5G proxy" is a mobile proxy whose device connects to the carrier over 5G.
The website never sees the radio. It receives an address, and the carrier owns that address whichever radio carried the request. IP data services sort connections into broad classes. MaxMind's documentation lists four connection types: Cable/DSL, Cellular, Corporate and Satellite. Nothing in that list separates 4G from 5G.
So the radio shapes the link between the device and the tower. The site at the other end receives a carrier address either way. When you compare a 4G offer with a 5G one, compare the price, the countries and the session options.
Search interest in both terms jumped in 2026. In Google's Keyword Planner, searches for "5g proxy" went from about 200 a month in late 2025 to 6,600 in August 2026. "4g proxy" peaked the same month at 4,400. "lte proxy" stayed between 260 and 880 a month.
- 5g proxy
- 4g proxy
- lte proxy
No source we found explains the jump. Keyword Planner also rounds its monthly figures, so read the shape of these lines more than the exact numbers.
Why do many people share one mobile address?
There are too few IPv4 addresses for every phone to get its own. Carriers solve this with carrier-grade NAT, or CGNAT. Subscribers get private addresses inside the carrier's network, and a small pool of public addresses carries their traffic out. In 2012, RFC 6598 set aside a block of addresses for the carrier side of this setup. Our page on CGNAT walks through the mechanics.
Researchers led by Philipp Richter measured how widespread this is for the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference. More than 90% of the cellular networks they could observe ran carrier-grade NAT. Some operators they surveyed reported 20 subscribers on a single address. Cloudflare wrote in 2025 that one IPv4 address "may represent hundreds or even thousands of users", and that CGNAT is common in mobile networks.
That sharing is why a carrier address is awkward to block. RFC 7021 studied what carrier-grade NAT does to applications. If a shared address lands on a blacklist, or a server caps connections per address, "it could negatively impact legitimate users." A ban aimed at one mobile user can lock out everyone behind the same address.
What did Cloudflare measure on shared addresses?
Cloudflare built a detector for CGNAT addresses and compared their traffic with everyone else's. It published the results in October 2025. Two of its findings matter to anyone buying mobile proxies.
The first is the share of bot traffic. The median bot rate was 4.8% on CGNAT addresses and 4.7% on the rest. The mean was lower on shared addresses, 7% against 13.1%. Other addresses spread all the way to 100% bots, while shared ones clustered mostly below 15%. Many real people on one address dilute whatever automation runs through it.
- Shared (CGNAT) addresses
- All other addresses
The second is the price of sharing. Cloudflare's customers rate-limited CGNAT addresses three times as often as other addresses, although their traffic scored as more human. Cloudflare's likely explanation: many users share the address, so legitimate traffic trips the limits more often. For a mobile proxy, both findings count. A site has reason to hesitate before banning a carrier address for good. The same address still runs into rate limits more often, because other people's requests add up on it too.
These figures cover CGNAT addresses of every kind, home and mobile together. They describe the crowd on a shared address, and they say nothing about any single provider.
Can a website tell that you use a mobile address?
It can tell that the address belongs to a carrier. IP data services label addresses by network type. MaxMind files carrier addresses under the user type "cellular", and IP2Location gives mobile carriers the usage type MOB. A site that buys such data knows when a request comes from a mobile network.
The same data shows how long an address tends to stay with one user. MaxMind scores that from 0 to 99.99 and notes that many cellular addresses score under one. Broadband addresses that rarely change typically score above thirty, by the same documentation. So a site cannot treat a carrier address as one person over time.
The address alone does not tell a site which of the people behind it you are. The other signals do the rest: the browser, the device, the rhythm of the requests. LiveProxies points out that a desktop user agent arriving from a mobile network may raise red flags. Our guide to how websites detect proxies covers those checks, and mobile vs residential proxies sets the labels for both kinds of address side by side.
What do mobile proxies cost?
We read the mobile price lists of 33 sellers between August 3 and October 14, 2026. On the smallest plan, the median price was $4.00 per GB. On the largest plan, it was $2.20. Most sellers lower the price per GB as the plan grows.
The smallest plans spread widely:
Four sellers started under $2: Proxyrack at $1.10, NSTProxy and ABCProxy at $1.20, and 711Proxy at $1.45. Infatica started highest, at $8. Oxylabs went from $7.50 on its smallest plan to $3.50 on its largest, and Decodo from $4.00 to $2.25. These are advertised rates on the day we read them. Sellers that rent whole modems by the day or month are not in these numbers.
Our mobile proxies cost $1.50 per GB from the first GB. On our own list, residential still costs less: one GB of residential Lite costs $0.50. The same holds at most sellers, and mobile vs residential proxies puts the two side by side, seller by seller.
When is a mobile proxy worth it?
A mobile proxy earns its price when the carrier address is the point of the job:
- Seeing what mobile users see. Ads, prices and pages that a site serves to visitors on mobile networks show up from a mobile network.
- Checking a service on carrier connections. A request from a carrier address shows how a site or an app treats mobile traffic in a given country.
- Targets where a ban has to stay narrow. Banning a carrier address hits everyone sharing it, and Cloudflare built its CGNAT detector to cut that collateral damage.
For most other work, a residential proxy does the job for less. Scraping public pages, checking prices from a city and keeping sessions on sites that accept home addresses all run on residential proxies, at $0.50/GB for one GB, falling to $0.44/GB at 2,000 GB+. If you need one fixed address for weeks, an ISP proxy fits better.
Our mobile proxies
Our mobile proxies run on 4G and 5G carrier addresses and cost $1.50 per GB. You pick the country, take a new address per request or hold one in a sticky session, and connect over HTTP or SOCKS5. The gateway and your login appear in your dashboard.
Billing is per GB, and your balance has no scheduled expiry. Unused balance can be refunded within 14 days. You can pay by card, crypto, Alipay, Pix or QRIS, from $3 in crypto and $10 with the other methods. An ordinary purchase needs no identity documents.
What this page could not check
- We tested no mobile network, ours included. Nothing here measures speed, success rates or blocks, and we bought no mobile plan to write it.
- The figures on carrier-grade NAT in cellular networks date from 2016. Cloudflare's bot and rate-limit figures cover shared addresses in general, home and mobile together.
- Keyword Planner rounds its monthly numbers, and no source we found explains the 2026 jump in 4G and 5G searches.
- Prices are sellers' advertised per-GB rates on the dates we read them, and plans that rent a whole modem by the day or month are left out. Prices and search interest move from month to month, so we will check this page again by December 22, 2026.
Sources
- Cloudflare, "One IP address, many users: Detecting CGNAT to reduce collateral effects", October 29, 2025, updated July 15, 2026.
- Philipp Richter and others, "A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment", ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2016.
- IETF, RFC 6598: IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space, April 2012.
- IETF, RFC 7021: Assessing the Impact of Carrier-Grade NAT on Network Applications, September 2013.
- MaxMind, GeoIP web services responses documentation (connection type, user type and static IP score), read October 22, 2026.
- IP2Location, usage types, read October 22, 2026.
- LiveProxies, "What Are Mobile Proxies and How Do They Work?", read October 22, 2026.
- ProxyEmpire, "What Are Mobile Proxies? 4G & 5G Proxies Explained (2026)", read October 22, 2026.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner, monthly searches for "5g proxy", "4g proxy" and "lte proxy", read October 22, 2026.
- The mobile pricing pages of 33 sellers, read August 3 to October 14, 2026.
