JoyProxy Team. We sell both lines. This is the version we give people in chat when they buy mobile traffic for a desktop crawl — or residential traffic for an in-app ad check — and then write in confused.
A lot of orders start the same way. Someone already has residential. The page they care about still looks wrong, or the SDK returns empty. They assume the next step is “a better residential,” and mobile is just that: same city, higher $/GB, maybe the site likes it more.
It isn’t. The city can match. The ASN still doesn’t. Residential exits as home broadband. Mobile exits as a carrier — Verizon, Vodafone, a local 4G/5G network, not your cable modem with an iPhone User-Agent taped on. Plenty of apps and ad stacks look that up. They are not impressed by iPhone in a header if the IP belongs to a household ISP.
On JoyProxy the SKUs are also not mirrors of each other. Mobile is rotating traffic only. There is no dedicated 4G line, no Custom port that sits on one cell tower for a month. If you need one identity that does not wander, that is residential Static (or Business/ISP / datacenter Static). We will not invent a mobile-static SKU in the checkout to make the spreadsheet prettier.
Same city, different network
We already wrote the residential vs datacenter piece. That split is hosting ASN vs household ASN. Mobile is a third pile: cellular ASN. Treat them as three answers, not a quality ranking.
| Residential | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|
| Exit | Home broadband | 4G / 5G carrier |
| What we sell | Rotating, Static, Custom | Rotating only |
| How you pay | GB pack, or per IP / port by duration | Its own GB ladder — not “residential plus a tax” |
| Geo | Country, state, city (stock that day) | Same idea, different pool |
| Logged-in session | Static if the account has to stay put | A bad fit — the IP is supposed to move |
Ballpark on the public list, not a contract: rotating residential starts around $3.50/GB on 1 GB and falls toward $1.80 at 1000 GB. Mobile starts around $4.00/GB and around $2.00 at the top tier. Packs do not expire; you burn GB until the balance is gone. Live numbers live on pricing. Neither family includes mainland-China routes.
When the target actually wants a carrier
In-app and mobile-web ads are the clean case. Our own ad verification page says it in one line: SDK / mobile web → mobile rotating. Desktop display or pre-roll → residential rotating. Mix them and you get false passes — the creative “worked” on a network the campaign will never serve.
App QA is next. Login walls, carrier billing, region-locked video, “this title is not available on Wi-Fi” nonsense. If the product under test keys off the radio, a home-broadband IP in the same city still looks like Wi-Fi. That is not a proxy bug.
Some storefronts and ad consoles are blunter: they classify the ASN as mobile or not. You will not argue them out of it with a TLS fingerprint. Buy the network they asked for, or pick a different test.
When residential is the cheaper correct answer
Public HTML, price monitors, desktop SERPs — see the SEO geo post if that is the job. You need a household path, not a SIM. Mobile GB here is just a more expensive way to fetch the same document.
Seller backends, ads manager, anything that remembers you: rotation is the enemy. We keep repeating this because it keeps showing up in tickets. IRCTC at 10:00 and marketplace shops are the same pattern. One login, one IP. That is residential Static, not a mobile pack that hands you a new tower every session.
If you only needed “not a datacenter,” stop at residential. That is the whole point of the other comparison article.
The expensive ways to get this wrong
Buying mobile to scrape desktop pages. The pages do not care. Your invoice will.
Checking in-app placements through residential, then shipping the campaign. You measured the wrong network. The fail shows up in production, not in your QA spreadsheet.
Stuffing a logged-in flow through mobile rotating and then asking why OTP landed on IP A and checkout left from IP B. Same failure we already described for cheap VPNs. The line is doing what you paid for: it rotates.
Hunting for “mobile static” in the dashboard. It is not there. If you need a pin, change network family. Residential / Business Custom can move city on a port; mobile cannot, because there is no Custom SKU on that pool.
Buy it, then prove the ASN before you pour GB
Mobile checkout is the rotating tab, network type Mobile, a traffic pack. Then the usual: Whitelist & Users, generate host:port under Endpoints, paste that into the client. The Exit IP on the page is a lookup, not the proxy address. People still mix those up.
Run one request through the Proxy Tester or any IP/ASN lookup you already trust. If the org is a cable ISP, you are not on mobile, no matter what the User-Agent says. Fix the pack before you run the job overnight.
Short answers
Is mobile “more anonymous”?
No. It is a different network type. Some targets want that type. Others do not look at it at all.
Can I pick a city on mobile?
Yes, when we have stock. Same country / state / city filters as rotating residential, different inventory.
Do you sell a dedicated mobile IP?
Not today. Rotating traffic only. Dedicated lines are on residential, Business/ISP, or datacenter.
Does unused mobile GB expire?
No. It sits until you use it. Same rule as residential rotating packs.
Ask one question before you open Purchase: does this target care that the ASN is a carrier? If yes, mobile rotating. If no, stay on residential — rotating for throwaway requests, static when the session has to look like the same house tomorrow.
Mobile is its own GB ladder. Confirm the ASN, then spend the pack.
Buy rotating traffic