1. The Power of Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT)
Mobile carriers (such as T-Mobile, Vodafone, or AT&T Mobility) face a severe shortage of IPv4 addresses. To connect hundreds of millions of smartphones, carriers deploy Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), where hundreds or thousands of mobile devices share a single public IPv4 address simultaneously.
Anti-bot systems (Cloudflare, Akamai, Instagram, TikTok) are acutely aware of CGNAT. If an anti-bot system blocks a mobile IPv4 address because of one aggressive scraper, it would simultaneously block thousands of innocent human mobile users browsing on that same cell tower. Consequently, anti-bot firewalls maintain extraordinarily lenient rate limits for mobile IP ranges.
2. Cost vs. Scale: Why Residential Wins for Large Scrapers
While mobile proxies have slightly higher trust scores, they carry a 3x to 5x price premium ($10-$25/GB) and have significantly lower total IP pool sizes. For high-volume web scraping (retrieving millions of product pages or travel prices daily), running on mobile proxies is cost-prohibitive.
Residential proxies from 2Captcha provide the sweet spot: over 99% anti-bot pass rates at a fraction of the cost ($3.99/GB down to $1.25/GB), backed by an expansive global pool across 220+ countries.