Dedicated modem or shared mobile pool? The comparison, with the arithmetic

There are two ways to buy a mobile proxy and they are not two grades of the same thing. One is a shared pool: many devices, many customers, requests spread across whatever is free, billed by the gigabyte or by the slot. The other is a dedicated modem: one device with one carrier SIM, assigned to one customer for a term, billed flat. Dedicated Mobile Proxies sells only the second kind, so you should read this page knowing that. We have tried to make it fair anyway, because a shared pool is the better buy for some work, and sending those buyers to us would waste their money and our support time.

What each one physically is

A shared mobile pool is a fleet of devices, often phones running an SDK that resells their connection, sometimes modem racks like ours but with several customers per SIM. Your request goes to a gateway, the gateway picks a device, and the device sends the request. You can ask for a sticky session, which pins you to one device for some minutes, but the device is still carrying other customers' traffic at the same time, and when you come back tomorrow it is a different device.

A dedicated modem is one device in one of our facilities with one carrier SIM in it. For the term you paid for, your credentials lead to that device and nothing else leads there. The radio carries your traffic only. The session history is yours only. The address changes when you rotate or when the carrier resets the session, and nobody else can cause either.

What the sharing actually costs you

The address is shared in both cases; carrier-grade NAT puts many real phones behind every mobile address, and no vendor can change that. The difference is what else is shared. On a pool, the device's behaviour as seen by a website is the sum of every customer on it. If one of them is hammering a login page, the website's view of that device includes the hammering, and your signed-in session on the same device inherits the suspicion. If one of them triggers a rotation, your sticky session ends. If one of them saturates the radio, your throughput drops.

On a dedicated modem none of that can happen because there is nobody to do it. This matters little for a one-off page fetch and enormously for anything with an account attached, because accounts are judged on history and a pool gives you someone else's.

The arithmetic per gigabyte

Pools are commonly sold by data. Take a representative price of $8 per gigabyte for mobile pool traffic; some vendors are cheaper, some are more expensive, and the exact number does not change the shape of the result. A dedicated 4G modem here is $69 a month with unlimited data, a 5G modem $79.

At 2 gigabytes a month the pool costs $16 and the modem costs $69: the pool wins by a wide margin. At 9 gigabytes they are roughly level. At 30 gigabytes a month the pool costs $240 and the modem still costs $69. At 100 gigabytes, which is one evening of video testing or a month of image-heavy monitoring, the pool costs $800. Everything past nine gigabytes a month is money the pool charges you for the privilege of sharing a device.

The arithmetic per identity

The other way to count is by identity. If your work is a set of accounts that must each look like one person in one place, the question is what it costs to give each of them a stable origin. On a pool, a stable origin does not exist; the best you get is a sticky session that ends when the vendor or another customer decides, so each identity is exposed to a changing device no matter what you pay.

On dedicated hardware, one identity costs one modem: $69 or $79 a month, or $5 or $6 a day if the identity only works some days. Two related accounts that may openly share an origin can share a modem; two that must look unrelated need two. That is the whole model, and it is easy to budget because it is a count of identities multiplied by a flat price, with no meter underneath.

Geography and selection

Pools let you choose a country, often a state, sometimes a city, and the pool picks a device that matches. The match is only as good as the pool's inventory in that place at that moment, and it can quietly fall back to a neighbouring area. A dedicated modem is in a specific facility in a specific city: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, North Carolina or Boston. The carrier address resolves to that metro or state, with the known exceptions we document on our carrier pages, and if the city you need changes you move the modem from the dashboard for free.

A pool covers more countries than we do. If you need Germany or Brazil, a pool is the answer and we are not. We sell US carrier lines only.

Where the pool is the better buy

Low-volume, signed-out, geographically scattered work: checking a handful of pages from a dozen states once a week, verifying that an ad shows in four countries, spot-checking a price in a city we do not cover. Under a few gigabytes a month with no accounts involved, the pool costs less and the sharing does not hurt you. Buy the pool for that work and do not let a sales page talk you out of it.

Where the dedicated modem is the better buy

Anything with an account: social profiles, marketplace seller accounts, vendor portals, ad accounts, anything that signs in and is judged on history. Anything over about nine gigabytes a month. Anything where you need the same device tomorrow, such as a monitoring series that must come from one origin. Anything where another customer's behaviour landing on your session would cost you more than $69. For those, the flat price is the cheaper price and the exclusivity is the product.

If you are unsure, buy two hours. An hourly block on a dedicated modem is $2 on 4G or $3 on 5G for the first two hours, never renews, and tells you how the line behaves against your actual targets before you commit to a month.

Questions about per-GB pricing