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Proxy sellers have a ready answer for why their mobile IPs are hard to block: carrier-grade NAT puts many phones behind one public IPv4 address, so a block on the proxy is a block on the carrier's customers too. The sharing is real. A study of a large CDN's traffic published in August, Hsu, Pearce, Li, Berger and Richter's Detecting and Characterizing Massively Shared IP Addresses, describes carrier-grade NATs that "share hundreds or thousands of users on a single IP", and found "over 40% of total traffic coming from less than 2% of active IP addresses".
What that argument leaves out is time. A mobile proxy holds a carrier address for a while, then the address goes back to the carrier's pool. So we measured how long. Our Mobile Proxy IP database's 90-day list, as published on 2026-10-09, holds 2,497,210 IPv4 addresses seen as mobile proxies between July 11 and October 8. 70.5% of them were seen on one day only.
Most are seen for a day
| Days from first to last sighting | IPv4 addresses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Same day | 1,759,681 | 70.5% |
| 1 to 6 | 264,733 | 10.6% |
| 7 to 29 | 213,575 | 8.6% |
| 30 or more | 259,221 | 10.4% |
That's when we saw each address, which is all a list can go on: an address seen once may have carried proxy traffic for longer.
IPv6 turns over faster: 92.1% of the list's 1,015,034 IPv6 addresses were seen on one day. Carrier NAT is mostly an IPv4 question, since a phone on IPv6 normally gets a prefix of its own, though the study above found "some surprising exceptions among mobile providers". The rest of this post is IPv4.
What yesterday's lists caught
The 1-day list published on 2026-10-09 holds the 50,092 IPv4 addresses seen as mobile proxies on October 8. Each list published a day earlier, on October 8, already held this many of them:
| Mobile Proxy IP list, 2026-10-08 | IPv4 in it | Of October 8's 50,092 | Share of the list seen again |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-day | 65,501 | 5,341 (10.7%) | 8.2% |
| 7-day | 387,953 | 14,949 (29.8%) | 3.9% |
| 14-day | 688,510 | 17,858 (35.7%) | 2.6% |
| 30-day | 1,168,336 | 20,933 (41.8%) | 1.8% |
| 60-day | 1,761,345 | 24,512 (48.9%) | 1.4% |
| 90-day | 2,503,450 | 26,906 (53.7%) | 1.1% |
Nearly half of the day's mobile proxy addresses weren't in the 90-day list at all. For residential proxies, the day before's 90-day list held 91.4% of the day's IPv4 when we checked on 2026-09-27.
The 90-day list holds 38 times the addresses of the 1-day list and caught 5 times as many of the next day's. 1.1% of its addresses turned up as mobile proxies again on October 8.
Where they cluster
The 90-day list's 2,497,210 addresses sit in 251,039 /24 blocks. The median block holds two of them, and 42.8% of blocks hold one. But most addresses are in dense blocks: 81.4% sit in the 57,023 blocks holding 10 or more, and 24.3% in the 3,892 holding 100 or more. 752 blocks hold 200 or more.
That's where widening a hit to its /24 goes wrong. October 8's 50,092 addresses sit in 25,549 /24s, 6,540,544 addresses in all: 130 times as many. 1,114,338 of those, 17.0%, were seen as mobile proxies at any time in the 90 days to October 8. The other 5,426,206 never were.
A rule for mobile proxy hits
- Block, or step up to a challenge, on the 1-day and 7-day lists. A hit there is at most a week old.
- Score on the 30 to 90-day lists. Each address carries
first_seen,last_seen,hitsandhits_days_pct(schema), so a hit from last week can count for more than one from July. - Match the address, never its /24.
Mobile proxies are in the residential list too
2,338,823 of the 2,497,210 mobile proxy IPv4 addresses, 93.7%, are also in the 90-day list of our Residential Proxy IP database from the same day. A team that already checks residential proxies flags most mobile ones. What Mobile Proxy IP adds is which of those hits are carrier-issued addresses, the ones most likely to sit behind carrier NAT.
How we measured
Every figure is from the Mobile Proxy IP lists published on 2026-10-09, each window ending October 8, except the check against the lists published a day earlier. An address counts as seen on one day when its first_seen and last_seen fall on the same date. A /24 is the 256 addresses sharing an address's first three octets. The residential match is on the full address, against Residential Proxy IP's 90-day list from 2026-10-09. On each day from August 10 to 16, the check against the day before's lists gave 18 to 20% for the 1-day list and 54 to 57% for the 90-day one.
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