Pick a City, Pick a Carrier: How to Choose for the Job

Our whole menu fits on one screen: eight cities, three carriers, 4G or 5G. That still leaves a lot of combinations, and the question we get most in the Telegram bot is some version of which one should I pick. The honest answer is that it depends on what the job needs to look like from the other side. This guide walks through how a website actually reads a carrier address, and then turns that into a short set of choices you can make in under a minute.

What a website really reads from a carrier address

When your request arrives at a site, the site has an IP address and not much else. It looks that address up in a geolocation database and gets back an owner, a network type, and a location. For a carrier address the owner is the carrier, the type is mobile, and the location is a metro area or a state. Not a neighborhood, not a street. Carrier pools are regional, so even the carrier could not tell a site which tower you were on.

This matters for choosing a city because the precision you are buying is city-level. If a job needs to look like it is in Houston, a Houston line does that. If a job needs to look like it is on a specific block of Houston, nothing on any carrier can do that, and anyone promising it is reading a different database than the sites are.

One more thing the site sees: the carrier name. AT&T Mobility (AS20057), T-Mobile USA (AS21928) and Verizon Wireless (AS6167 and AS22394) are all recognized as mobile networks by every fraud and geolocation vendor we have tested. That mobile flag is most of what you are paying for; the city is the rest.

Choosing the city

Start with where the people you are studying, serving or testing actually are. A marketplace that shows different listings in Phoenix and Miami should be checked from Phoenix and Miami, not from one city with a hopeful guess. An account that has always logged in from Chicago should keep logging in from Chicago. A regional ad campaign is checked from the region it targets.

If the job has no geographic need, pick the city closest to you for the lowest latency, or the one that has the most free stock on the day. All eight cities are the same price, so there is no reason to compromise on location to save money.

The eight cities on the menu are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, North Carolina (Charlotte and the Research Triangle) and Boston. Between them they cover both coasts, the Southwest, the Gulf, the Midwest and the Southeast, and all four mainland time zones except the Mountain zone's northern half.

Choosing the carrier

All three carriers are mobile in the eyes of a site. The differences are in how they behave. T-Mobile tends to hand out a fresh address most readily when you rotate, which suits jobs that want many identities in a day. Verizon tends to hold a session longer and its addresses sit in a large pool, which suits jobs that want one identity to sit still. AT&T sits in between and has the widest spread of pool regions across our cities.

If the account or audience you care about is on a particular carrier, match it. Nobody is suspicious of a Verizon customer on a Verizon address. If you have no preference, pick whichever carrier has the strongest signal in the city you chose; the stock page shows which lines are available right now, and support will tell you plainly which device has the best signal on a given day if you ask.

There is a known quirk worth knowing: in Boston, Verizon addresses geolocate as Boston, while AT&T addresses from the same shelf geolocate as New York. If Boston is the point, pick Verizon there. Everywhere else the carriers all read as their own city.

4G or 5G

A site cannot tell 4G from 5G. Both are the same carrier, the same pool and the same mobile flag. The difference is on your side: 4G LTE typically 20–45 Mbps, 5G 50+ Mbps, depending on carrier signal at the device. For account work, checks and browsing, 4G is more than enough and it saves a dollar a day. For heavy page loads, video previews or many parallel sessions, the 5G line at $5 a day is worth it.

A one-minute decision list

If you want the short version, answer these in order and the menu will narrow itself.

• Where does the job need to appear to be? Pick that city. No preference: pick the nearest.
• Does the account or audience live on one carrier? Pick that carrier. No preference: pick the strongest signal that day.
• Many identities per day: lean T-Mobile. One identity that sits still: lean Verizon. Not sure: AT&T.
• Heavy pages or several sessions at once: 5G. Everything else: 4G.
• Unsure how long you need it: day pass. You can extend a live line without starting over.

When you picked wrong

It happens, and it costs nothing. Moving a line to another city is a self-service button in the dashboard and the remaining time moves with it. If it is the carrier that was wrong, end the line and start a new one on the right carrier; a day pass makes a wrong guess a $4 lesson instead of a month-long regret.

If you are still unsure after reading this, write to [email protected] or ping @MobileProxyZoneBot with the job in one sentence. A person answers, around the clock, and will just tell you which line to pick.

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