Mobile web connection is already as fast and secure as any other way to use the internet. It’s proven by the fact that more than half of internet traffic is mobile. For this reason, using mobile internet to set up proxies has become commonplace.

Mobile proxies have become a great way to route your internet traffic since at least 3G, and while there are more advanced options, 4G is the epitome of performance and affordability. This article will explore what 4G mobile proxies can achieve for your needs.

What are mobile proxies?

Mobile proxies act as intermediaries that hide your IP address, change your geolocation, and route your network requests. Essentially, they create an additional security and privacy barrier between you and the internet. With a mobile proxy, you are not contacting a web service directly. Instead, you ask the proxy to do it for you.

In doing so, such a proxy, as the name suggests, uses a mobile device to route your connection. Smartphones or tablets are most frequently used for connecting to cellular towers instead of an ordinary landline Internet Service Provider (ISP). Cellular towers differ in their setup.

Cellular networks are spread worldwide and cover most of the earth’s surface already. They use radio waves to support voice, radio, internet, and other types of communication. Each tower has its own area coverage, but to make the connection consistent, it usually overlaps with other towers.

Such setup of towers around the world enables users to have the best possible connection they can get in a specific location. Every mobile device is constantly communicating with the nearest tower to check whether it has an optimal connection. Once the device moves to a range of another tower, it connects to it.

IP address rotation

Understanding how cellular towers work is important before using mobile proxies. If you use other types of proxies, you are more likely to shield your connection with one IP address, but mobile residential proxies are rarely static.

Mobile IP addresses are dynamic as they are adapted to service users who are on the move. The device is constantly looking for a new tower, and with each change, the IP address also changes. But in many cases, mobile internet providers rotate mobile IP addresses by default.

Since they have thousands or even millions of users connecting to the same towers, they are doing their best to balance the load to towers and optimize the connection speed. That’s why mobile IPs may be changed even if you are keeping the device in one location.

There is nothing that the proxy provider can do, yet some of them guarantee that mobile IP addresses won’t change for a certain duration, 24 hours, for example. However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that mobile IPs are dynamic.

IP rotation is frequently used with proxies to increase the legitimacy and security of the connection. If you are running software that might get the IP address banned, for example, rotating the IP address is beneficial. And since mobile proxies are dynamic by default, your rotation will not cause much suspicion from the server.

Benefits of mobile proxies

Highly legitimate. Mobile proxies might be the most legitimate proxy type, rivaled only by residential proxies. It’s easy to blend in with them, and they have an inbuilt rotation.

Mobile access. Some websites and services, such as social media platforms, require users to connect with mobile IPs to access full data. Mobile proxies are the only ones that can help in this regard.

Affordable. Mobile proxies aren’t expensive for providers to source, as they simply need to run an app on a mobile device. Many providers also don’t charge for bandwidth, which makes it cheap for data-intensive tasks.

Fast and getting faster. Mobile proxies are already faster than some landline residential connections, especially when you use them as proxies. However, the speed depends on what mobile internet generation you choose.

4G vs 5G mobile proxies

While other factors, such as location and provider, are important, mobile proxies have one unique feature to consider – mobile internet generation. Mobile proxies have really taken off only with 3G, as it became fast enough to route traffic. My first recommendation is to use at least 3g proxies.

• 3G mobile proxies have network speeds up to 7.2 Mbps
• 4G can reach network speeds up to 150 Mbps
• 5g can reach up to 20 Gbps

If these numbers aren’t telling you much about the performance, worry not. The practical speed when using mobile internet for running proxies is quite different anyway.

What you should look into is the price and performance ratio, in which case, a 4g proxy is the best option. 5G proxies can only theoretically reach up to 20 Gbps as the network is not developed so much at the moment.

Realistically, 5G proxies will reach only around 1 Gbps on a consistent basis. Of course, it is still at least nine times faster than 4G, but it will also cost that much more. You should consider whether your use case is worth it.

4G proxy use cases

Social media accounts management. Many marketers and businesses need multiple social media accounts, which cannot be done with one or two IP addresses. Mobile proxies are used in large pools for such use cases. They allow to access mobile platforms, such as TikTok or Instagram, and run automated software.

Testing programs. Every good developer tests its software before releasing it, but testing can take a lot of time. You need to run the program from various devices and IP addresses, mobile ones as well. In fact, mobile apps cannot be tested without mobile proxies at all. That’s why they are crucial for any app development project of any size.

Conclusion

4G mobile proxies can achieve everything other proxy types can with high legitimacy, cost-effectiveness, and mobile access. 5G is bound to surpass them, but at the moment, 4G is the best option.