Mobile IP

What a mobile IP is

A mobile IP address is a public address used by a cellular carrier's data network. Carriers do not have enough IPv4 addresses to give every phone its own, so they run carrier-grade NAT: thousands of subscribers in a region share one public address, and the mix changes constantly as devices connect and move between cells. The owning ASN belongs to the carrier, and its name usually makes that obvious ("Mobile", "Wireless", "Cellular", or a carrier brand).

Carriers that have rolled out IPv6 often give each device its own IPv6 address while still sharing IPv4, which is one reason the two protocols can tell different stories about the same phone.

Why it matters

Because so many people share a mobile address, websites are reluctant to block or hard-challenge it: one bad actor would lock out a whole city of legitimate customers. The address also changes often, so a reputation does not stick. For those reasons mobile addresses are treated as the most trusted class of traffic by many fraud systems, ahead of residential and far ahead of datacenter addresses, and mobile proxies are priced accordingly.

Our anonymity score applies no deduction for a network classified as a mobile carrier. The consistency checks still apply: a mobile address paired with a desktop browser fingerprint and a mismatched time zone is a contradiction a site can notice.

How to check

The proxy checker reports the network type and the rule that classified it as a mobile carrier. IP lookup shows the carrier's ASN, country, and the announced prefix the address belongs to. If the classification is wrong for a carrier you know, the ASN name probably did not match our keyword list; use the contact page to tell us.

Common misconceptions

A mobile address does not mean the visitor is on a phone. Tethering, mobile routers, and mobile proxy farms all produce carrier addresses from ordinary computers. Conversely, a phone on home Wi-Fi shows the household's residential address, not a mobile one.