US Mobile Proxy IP Location, Defined: Hardware vs Lookup

Two locations are attached to every US mobile proxy, and they are routinely confused. The first is the hardware location: the city where the SIM, the modem and the antenna physically are. The second is the IP location: the place that a geolocation provider associates with the public address the proxy uses. Mobile Proxy USA keeps hardware in eight US metros, and we state the hardware location of every line exactly. The IP location is not ours to state; it is published by third parties. This page defines both terms, describes how the second one is produced, explains why the two can differ, and sets out a procedure for verifying the IP location of a line you have bought.

Definitions

Hardware location: the street address of the rack holding the device. It determines which cell towers serve the SIM and therefore the radio conditions of the line.

IP location: a city, region and country that a geolocation provider assigns to an IP address. It is an inference, recorded in a database, and it is what websites use when they need to know where a visitor is.

Egress gateway: the point at which a mobile carrier passes subscriber traffic from its internal network to the public internet. On US carriers, this is a regional facility serving a large area, and it is where carrier-grade NAT translates many subscribers onto a shared set of public addresses.

With those three terms the whole subject can be stated in one sentence: the IP location of a mobile line describes its egress gateway, while the hardware location describes the rack.

How a geolocation provider produces an IP location

An IP address contains no geographic coordinates. Providers such as MaxMind (GeoIP2), IP2Location, ipinfo and DB-IP each maintain a mapping from address ranges to places, compiled from several kinds of evidence:

• Registration records, in which the carrier lists an organisation address for each allocated range.
• Routing data, showing where and by whom each range is announced to the internet.
• Geofeeds, files in the RFC 8805 format in which a network declares the intended region of its ranges.
• Latency measurements taken from known reference points.
• Observations contributed by applications and devices that report a location alongside an address.

Why the result is a metro or a state

For a mobile range, each type of evidence points at the egress gateway rather than at any tower. A device attaches to a nearby tower, but its packets are carried across the carrier backbone to the gateway, and the public address appears only there, shared through carrier-grade NAT with a large population of ordinary handsets. The provider therefore records the metro that the gateway serves, or only the state if its evidence is weaker, and in some cases a neighbouring hub city that handles a wider region.

Granularity below the metro is not available. An IP location for a mobile range will not identify a street, a postal code or a district, and no mobile proxy provider can truthfully offer that. In less populous markets a carrier may also serve several states from one pool, in which case a rotation can return an address that a provider files under an adjacent state.

Carrier dependence: an observed case in Boston

Each carrier designs its own gateway layout, so the IP location depends on the carrier as well as on the city. Our Boston hardware illustrates this directly. Verizon lines at that site have an IP location of Boston. AT&T lines at the same site, in the same rack and served by the same towers, have an IP location of New York.

The difference follows from network architecture. AT&T concentrates a great deal of traffic through central hubs, so its addresses frequently geolocate to a larger city than the one the device is in. Verizon egresses this region in a way the providers associate with Boston itself. Neither result indicates a fault, and both are stable for the ranges concerned.

Variation between providers and over time

Providers do not share evidence and do not update simultaneously, so the same address can receive different IP locations from different providers on the same day. Carriers also reassign ranges between markets, and a provider may take some time to reflect the change. Consequently the IP location of a line can change after a rotation to a new address, or after a provider releases an update, while the hardware location stays fixed.

The appropriate response is to consult more than one provider and to take the location on which most of them agree.

Location signals other than the IP

Websites combine the IP location with information supplied by the browser: the system timezone, the accepted languages, the result of the HTML5 geolocation API, which is computed on the device from GPS or Wi-Fi and is independent of the IP, and addresses that WebRTC may disclose. An inconsistency between these, such as a US carrier address with a timezone far outside the United States, is itself a signal. Antidetect browsers, GoLogin and Undetectable.io among them, can set a profile's timezone and reported coordinates to match what the proxy address implies, which removes the inconsistency.

Movement of a mobile IP within one carrier network is generally accepted by platforms, since it resembles a subscriber travelling. Simultaneous use of one account or fingerprint from two locations is what tends to be flagged.

Verification procedure

First, determine whether the task requires a specific metro or only a state or country. Second, after purchase, query the address with the IP checker provided on this site's Tools page and with at least one external service; ipinfo.io is a dependable single source, and browserleaks.com/ip displays several providers together. Third, record the location where the answers cluster, and repeat after rotations. If that location does not meet the requirement, contact support. A change of city or carrier carries no charge, location moves can be made from the dashboard without assistance, and support can recommend the carrier whose ranges geolocate as required.

Frequently asked