Mobile proxies in 2026: how many are really mobile?

"Mobile proxy" has become one of the most stretched labels in our industry. Some providers mean an IP that belongs to a phone on a 4G or 5G network. Others mean any IP registered to a company that also sells phone plans. Those are very different things, and the difference decides whether a social platform sees a phone or a home router.

We have been running proxy infrastructure since 2017, and this year we rebuilt our mobile product from scratch. Along the way we measured our own residential network to answer a simple question: of all the residential IPs online at a given moment, how many are really mobile?

The short answer: about 6 in 100

When we checked our residential network across 230 countries on 3 October 2026, only 6.3% of the IPs passed our mobile checks. The other 93.7% were home and office connections.

That share is what matters, not a headcount. Mobile IPs rotate constantly as phones move between cell towers, so any "IPs online right now" number changes by the minute. Over a month the picture looks very different. Our gateways each see 3 to 4 million unique residential IPs per day. At a 6.3% mobile share, that is roughly 190,000 to 250,000 unique mobile IPs every day, and more than 600,000 unique mobile IPs every month as phones rotate through new addresses. We are now counting unique verified mobile IPs directly and will publish the measured 30-day total in our next report.

A carrier's name is not proof

The most common shortcut in the market is to call an IP "mobile" because its network (its ASN) belongs to a mobile carrier. We tested that shortcut.

Across all IPs registered to mobile carriers, 24% turned out to be home or office lines, not phones. For some well-known carriers the share was much higher:

The reason is simple: many carriers sell both mobile plans and home internet, sometimes on the same network registration. A provider that sorts IPs by carrier name alone would sell you mostly home connections labeled "AT&T mobile".

Other networks are almost purely mobile. T-Mobile US, Verizon, Saudi Telecom and Reliance Jio came out at or close to 0% rejected.

Where mobile IPs are

Mobile supply is not spread the way most people expect. In our measurement the largest mobile supply came from Saudi Arabia, followed by the United States, Morocco, Jordan, India, Nigeria, Turkey, France, Kazakhstan and the UAE. Big markets like Japan were thin: almost everything registered to Japanese carriers turned out to be home internet.

What this means when you buy mobile proxies

1. Ask how "mobile" is defined. If the answer is "by carrier", expect a large share of home lines.
2. Test before you commit. Request a few IPs and look them up in two independent IP databases. A real mobile IP shows the carrier and a mobile connection type.
3. Check the country you need. Mobile supply is uneven. A provider can be strong in the US and thin in Japan.
4. Expect less, but better. A pool of genuinely mobile IPs is much smaller than a pool of everything carrier-registered. That is normal.

How we measured

• Source: Rainproxy's own residential network, aggregated across all our gateways. No customer traffic or customer data is used.
• What "verified mobile" means: an IP counts as mobile when an IP intelligence database marks it as a mobile connection, and a second, independent database doesn't contradict it. Carrier networks known to mix home and mobile lines get extra scrutiny.
• "Rejected" means: the IP is registered to a mobile carrier but did not pass the mobile check.
• Timing: measured on 3 October 2026, the latest reading per gateway. Where two gateways see the same country, we counted the larger one, not both. We will publish updated numbers every quarter, including 30-day unique totals.

Try it yourself

Our Mobile proxies only use IPs that passed these checks. You can target by country, state, city or carrier (for example AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile in the US), and your data never expires.