Proxies
Datacenter vs residential vs mobile IPs: which one to use
All proxy IPs are not equal. Datacenter IPs are fast and cheap but blacklisted by every major streaming service. Residential IPs are slower but pass. Mobile IPs are the gold standard for the hardest services. Here's when to use each.
The three IP classes
Datacenter IPs come from cloud providers — AWS, GCP, Azure, Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean. They're cheap, fast, and easily identifiable because the IP ranges belong to cloud ASNs. Streaming services, banks, and most AI providers maintain blocklists of these ranges.
Residential IPs are addresses allocated to home internet subscribers by ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, China Telecom. They're slow (because you share the bandwidth with the homeowner) and expensive, but they pass almost every blocklist because the IP reputation matches a real human user.
Mobile IPs are addresses assigned to mobile carriers (T-Mobile, Verizon, China Mobile). They have the highest reputation because they rotate among many users and the carriers' IP ranges are rarely blacklisted (a false positive blocks millions of real subscribers). The hardest services — Netflix originals, banking apps, some AI tools — work best on mobile IPs.
Decision matrix
Casual browsing, Google search, YouTube: datacenter is fine. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini: residential or mobile. Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max: residential required (datacenter universally blocked). Banking apps: mobile preferred. Crypto exchanges with strict KYC: residential in the supported region.
There's a fourth class: 4G/5G mobile proxies that route through real mobile devices. These are the most expensive and the most reliable. Services that detect 'is this a real mobile user' (mostly banking, some games) require this class.
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